I yet live
Sep. 26th, 2007 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muck_a_luckAt home, we have been watching TV.
Chuck and Reaper both look good. House and Bones got off to excellent starts. Atlantis is coming back. I had to catch the Michael Shanks Eureka (a show I love, but it's too much trouble to organize myself to watch), and I thought the script writers gave him a stupid part with terribly written expository "dialog," though he's nice eye candy and all what with the arms and whatnot, but still, I thought the daughter's boyfriend had a more interesting role. Still. Looked like MS got paid and didn't have to do much. Great work if you can get it.
Um. I feel like I watched at least another three shows, but can't remember, so maybe not.
So that's reason one that you have not heard from me. TV eats your brain and free time.
Meanwhile, at work, where I usually at least monitor my friends page during the day and make the occassional quick comment to people, I have been in my own, personal, computing hell.
Boss had a laptop fry, which was fine because he had totally backed up his data in the previous ten days or so on this portable. Minimal data loss. Except that he used Western Digital's proprietary software to do the backup and now it won't cough up the data. I've been working on that problem - and doing what I needed to do to diagnose what was happening has monopolized my CPU for about two days. I would use one of the other computers, but the proprietary software refuses to cooperate with any computer except mine and Boss' new, replacement laptop. On top of that, we are finally addressing our lack of regular backup. We bought a 1TB drive and formatted it RAID 1. The plan is, do full daily backups for computers in the office, plus a full backup of Boss every time he comes in, then duplicate teh 1TB drive onto the little portable (leaving the bleeping proprietary software out of the equation), so that boss can take a complete set of the office documents home with him every night. Convenient for him, plus it gives us an offsite backup. Hopefully, Boss will never run over the Passport on the same day the office burns down.
Using Robocopy to do the backups, btw. Seems fab.
On top of that, we finally bought a highspeed scanner. So had to install that, which was easy, but still, hardware related time not spent on my regular job. And we bought the scanner in order to digitize more paper, which means that before the Passport killed my CPU, I was document managing about thirty minutes a day. Sooooooo painful. Even with the big scanner. That is not going to end. It is now part of my job. *sigh*
On top of that, I upgraded QuickBooks from 2005-2007. This has been mostly a smooth transition as far as I can tell, with only a minor headdesk moment this morning when I did the first round of payroll using it. But it has downloaded upgrades already, and had to be registered, etc, etc.
AND, I finally got off my butt and called about the problem with TimeMatters. I upgraded Timematters from 5.0 to 8.0 in July. It had a major problem, which they fixed for me. It worked great til my first database maintenance. I had to restore from backup. And since that time, database maintenance hadn't worked. I spent a very frustrating couple of days on the phone with tech support explaining and reexplaining the problem to tech after tech. Plus they wanted to charge me for support, though it was an installation problem, which is supposed to be free. Oh. And I was also on the phone with them trying to get them to fix the licensing problem created when Boss' computer died. We couldn't reinstall on his new machine and I had to talk to about five different people before they resolved the issue. It was unbelieveable to me, since this is a widely used product and people must run into licensing problems like that all the time. It ought to have been a vanilla problem. FIVE PEOPLE had to help me with it. Lexis Nexis, get a clue!
What else. Oh. Boss and I killed a second laptop while he was waiting for the replacement for the one he fried on his own. So now we have new laptop, and two old, laptops, one of which had developed networkign issues, and one of which has been reformatted and developed networking issues.
I was trying to get everybody to see everybody else. The newest machine has Vista on it. Vista can eat shit and die (at least til I figure out how to make it do simple tasks like, you know, SHARE FILES). Vista is very, very unfriendly. It hates everyone. So networking to that machine is a bitch. And Norton has been freshly installed on all of the machines and has hijacked the firewalls. So I had to learn about that after pounding my head against walls for an unreasonably long amount of time. Then I DID fix it and got everybody seeing each other and sharing. Then everybody shut down for the day. Then when I rebooted, one of the notebooks restored Norton's preferred settings. And Boss deliberately restored his new machine's preferred settings (which I had fixed while he was meeting with a client), and SOMEHOW the other desktop station adopted Norton's preferred settings overnight. So I get to work this morning, and I can't get access to any drives and I'm like WTF?!?!?!?! but since I fixed the firewall problem yesterday, it took me almost an hour to finally, in desparation, check that issue AGAIN...
Meanwhile. Due to an amazingly stupid series of events, Cellmate's Boss' postage meter had to be replaced. The new postage meter is different. It is not as nice. But while I am pounding my head against these problems Cellmate is over there freaking out over the way the new machine functions. And woman from next office is, too. And they instantly look at me. Make it work. It is not rocket science. I poke it and prod it til it works. Which is, to be fair, what Cellmate was doing. And her Boss. But why were they bugging me about it. Particularly today, when yesterday I TOLD the woman from the next office how much it was pissing me off that Cellmate kept saying how they couldn't figure out how to make it work...
I am hopeful, though, that aside from this problem of getting data off the portable drive, everything else is actually working now.
The bad thing is, Boss insisted that I upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007. Which I believe will arrive tomorrow. I am not installing it til next week. I can't face more learning curve at this time. I know I will be hissing and spitting for days while I learn to use the new interface. I hope it has not lost functionality that I use. Yes, yes, I know. Supposedly the radical change was to give it MORE functionality, but the last version of Word I really liked was Word 2000. They did stupid things to the track changes tool in later updates. Ever since they made Track Changes worse, I have been suspicious of ever new upgrade. I am trying to go into this clear headed, not already angry. It's just a new interface. That's all. Everything else will be fine. Just got to find where the moved all my stuff, learn its new home, figure out how to turn off all the stupid automated defaults that they always create by that everybody hates. (Seriously. What do WordPerfect users hate when they get Word? All the CRAP Word does to your text without asking. ) I'll get it all figured out and it'll be cool. Who knows, six months from now I might even be ready to acknowledge advancement.
Oh. Also, I think I realized today one of the reasons that Word 2007 makes me so hostile. When using a computer, I am very text oriented. I dislike, in the extreme, large icons. Gah. Any place they come up on my computer, I go out of my way to find the option that disables them and turns them into a list, if at all possible. The new Word interface is very visual. Little symbols for lots of the functions. I really, really prefer the text menus, and only use certain selected, customized toolbars in Word. I think seeing those ribbons or whatever they are called up there at the top of my document all the time was making my brain rebel. I'll definitely be checking for ways to dump that if possible, though it is my understanding that getting rid of those is not an option.
In any case, I will come out of this with some new experiences and hopefully have staved off the Alzeheimer's for another couple of months.
Chuck and Reaper both look good. House and Bones got off to excellent starts. Atlantis is coming back. I had to catch the Michael Shanks Eureka (a show I love, but it's too much trouble to organize myself to watch), and I thought the script writers gave him a stupid part with terribly written expository "dialog," though he's nice eye candy and all what with the arms and whatnot, but still, I thought the daughter's boyfriend had a more interesting role. Still. Looked like MS got paid and didn't have to do much. Great work if you can get it.
Um. I feel like I watched at least another three shows, but can't remember, so maybe not.
So that's reason one that you have not heard from me. TV eats your brain and free time.
Meanwhile, at work, where I usually at least monitor my friends page during the day and make the occassional quick comment to people, I have been in my own, personal, computing hell.
Boss had a laptop fry, which was fine because he had totally backed up his data in the previous ten days or so on this portable. Minimal data loss. Except that he used Western Digital's proprietary software to do the backup and now it won't cough up the data. I've been working on that problem - and doing what I needed to do to diagnose what was happening has monopolized my CPU for about two days. I would use one of the other computers, but the proprietary software refuses to cooperate with any computer except mine and Boss' new, replacement laptop. On top of that, we are finally addressing our lack of regular backup. We bought a 1TB drive and formatted it RAID 1. The plan is, do full daily backups for computers in the office, plus a full backup of Boss every time he comes in, then duplicate teh 1TB drive onto the little portable (leaving the bleeping proprietary software out of the equation), so that boss can take a complete set of the office documents home with him every night. Convenient for him, plus it gives us an offsite backup. Hopefully, Boss will never run over the Passport on the same day the office burns down.
Using Robocopy to do the backups, btw. Seems fab.
On top of that, we finally bought a highspeed scanner. So had to install that, which was easy, but still, hardware related time not spent on my regular job. And we bought the scanner in order to digitize more paper, which means that before the Passport killed my CPU, I was document managing about thirty minutes a day. Sooooooo painful. Even with the big scanner. That is not going to end. It is now part of my job. *sigh*
On top of that, I upgraded QuickBooks from 2005-2007. This has been mostly a smooth transition as far as I can tell, with only a minor headdesk moment this morning when I did the first round of payroll using it. But it has downloaded upgrades already, and had to be registered, etc, etc.
AND, I finally got off my butt and called about the problem with TimeMatters. I upgraded Timematters from 5.0 to 8.0 in July. It had a major problem, which they fixed for me. It worked great til my first database maintenance. I had to restore from backup. And since that time, database maintenance hadn't worked. I spent a very frustrating couple of days on the phone with tech support explaining and reexplaining the problem to tech after tech. Plus they wanted to charge me for support, though it was an installation problem, which is supposed to be free. Oh. And I was also on the phone with them trying to get them to fix the licensing problem created when Boss' computer died. We couldn't reinstall on his new machine and I had to talk to about five different people before they resolved the issue. It was unbelieveable to me, since this is a widely used product and people must run into licensing problems like that all the time. It ought to have been a vanilla problem. FIVE PEOPLE had to help me with it. Lexis Nexis, get a clue!
What else. Oh. Boss and I killed a second laptop while he was waiting for the replacement for the one he fried on his own. So now we have new laptop, and two old, laptops, one of which had developed networkign issues, and one of which has been reformatted and developed networking issues.
I was trying to get everybody to see everybody else. The newest machine has Vista on it. Vista can eat shit and die (at least til I figure out how to make it do simple tasks like, you know, SHARE FILES). Vista is very, very unfriendly. It hates everyone. So networking to that machine is a bitch. And Norton has been freshly installed on all of the machines and has hijacked the firewalls. So I had to learn about that after pounding my head against walls for an unreasonably long amount of time. Then I DID fix it and got everybody seeing each other and sharing. Then everybody shut down for the day. Then when I rebooted, one of the notebooks restored Norton's preferred settings. And Boss deliberately restored his new machine's preferred settings (which I had fixed while he was meeting with a client), and SOMEHOW the other desktop station adopted Norton's preferred settings overnight. So I get to work this morning, and I can't get access to any drives and I'm like WTF?!?!?!?! but since I fixed the firewall problem yesterday, it took me almost an hour to finally, in desparation, check that issue AGAIN...
Meanwhile. Due to an amazingly stupid series of events, Cellmate's Boss' postage meter had to be replaced. The new postage meter is different. It is not as nice. But while I am pounding my head against these problems Cellmate is over there freaking out over the way the new machine functions. And woman from next office is, too. And they instantly look at me. Make it work. It is not rocket science. I poke it and prod it til it works. Which is, to be fair, what Cellmate was doing. And her Boss. But why were they bugging me about it. Particularly today, when yesterday I TOLD the woman from the next office how much it was pissing me off that Cellmate kept saying how they couldn't figure out how to make it work...
I am hopeful, though, that aside from this problem of getting data off the portable drive, everything else is actually working now.
The bad thing is, Boss insisted that I upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007. Which I believe will arrive tomorrow. I am not installing it til next week. I can't face more learning curve at this time. I know I will be hissing and spitting for days while I learn to use the new interface. I hope it has not lost functionality that I use. Yes, yes, I know. Supposedly the radical change was to give it MORE functionality, but the last version of Word I really liked was Word 2000. They did stupid things to the track changes tool in later updates. Ever since they made Track Changes worse, I have been suspicious of ever new upgrade. I am trying to go into this clear headed, not already angry. It's just a new interface. That's all. Everything else will be fine. Just got to find where the moved all my stuff, learn its new home, figure out how to turn off all the stupid automated defaults that they always create by that everybody hates. (Seriously. What do WordPerfect users hate when they get Word? All the CRAP Word does to your text without asking. ) I'll get it all figured out and it'll be cool. Who knows, six months from now I might even be ready to acknowledge advancement.
Oh. Also, I think I realized today one of the reasons that Word 2007 makes me so hostile. When using a computer, I am very text oriented. I dislike, in the extreme, large icons. Gah. Any place they come up on my computer, I go out of my way to find the option that disables them and turns them into a list, if at all possible. The new Word interface is very visual. Little symbols for lots of the functions. I really, really prefer the text menus, and only use certain selected, customized toolbars in Word. I think seeing those ribbons or whatever they are called up there at the top of my document all the time was making my brain rebel. I'll definitely be checking for ways to dump that if possible, though it is my understanding that getting rid of those is not an option.
In any case, I will come out of this with some new experiences and hopefully have staved off the Alzeheimer's for another couple of months.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 03:17 am (UTC)(Well, of course I'll be getting my hands on SGA after Friday...)
Gah! Computer hell! The PC using geeks at work are all using Vista now, so I know they've gotten the networking stuff totally solved. But they are professional computer geeks for a living.
I saw the demo of Word 2007's cartoon style interface. *eyeroll* You'll be used to it in another month once you've learned where everything is. The way stupidest thing to me is that not only can you not open Word 2007 (.docx) docs with a Mac, Microsft's Apple developers have been totally split off from their PC developers. Whatever the next version of Word is they're coming up with, it's not going to be the Mac equivalent of the PC version, and will likely never be again. W. T. F.? o.O
no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 03:34 am (UTC)And I have enabled your escapism. Posted some porn. *halo* :D
no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 03:37 am (UTC)You're off the hook for now.
See you Monday!