Geek

Talking to a computer user that you have never met before through a computer problem can be a challenge. If you know the person you have a relative idea of how the person thinks and you can bark out the appropriate commands for them to respond. If you don’t know the person, you could easily find yourself speaking in a way that they don’t understand at all.

Yesterday I was talking a customer through a DSL issue. He couldn’t get connected to the internet. He was an older gentleman that yelled into the phone when he spoke, I think he thought yelling made the string between the cans vibrate faster. I had him open up his web browser (in which he shrieked, “I use FoxFire!”) and type in the address of his DSL modem. This went beyond his comprehension, because there was no “www” at the beginning and no “.com” at the end, it’s just a series of numbers. To make it easier I had him type out the “http://” at the beginning of the address.

He asked, “Is that the upper small letters or just the small letters?”

I responded with, “just the small letters. Don’t use ‘SHIFT'”.

He gave me an “o.k.” and we were doing well for a few seconds until I arrived at the colon in the address.

“Is that one with dots?”

“Yes”.

“How many dots?”

“Two in a stack.”

“Where is it?”

“Next to the ‘L'”.

I heard him fiddle around and he replied, “I keep getting a comma in there!”

“It’s a capital semi-colon”, was my reply of resignation.

“Oh yeah!”, what his delighted response.

Thank goodness we didn’t have to approach the lower-case question mark for the “slash”¹.

¹ This is a particular nitpick of mine: the slash on the question mark is the “forward slash” and the other slash is the “backslash”. You use “forward slash” in web addresses. For the most part you only use backslash in Windows filenames (and yes I know about backslash use in other operating systems).

So today I trekked up to the family hardware store to work on their computerized accounting system. Now in this day and age it may seem odd to hear the phrase “computerized accounting system” but that’s the best phrase I can come up with to describe this situation.

Up until 1986 my grandmother handled the accounts receivable for the business. She posted invoices and credits to the customer accounts and then at the end of the month, working with my grandfather they would send out the statements to the customers that owed money. She did all this accounting on a mechanical NCR posting machine, which looked like a large adding machine from 1971 that had a typewriter style carriage on it; the adding machine would do the tallying in the appropriate columns, “Debit”, “Credit”, “Balance Due”, etc. It was the norm back in 1971. In 1986, computers were taking over the duties.

In 1986 my aunt took over (for the most part) the accounting responsibilities of the business from my grandfather. I handled the accounts receivable that summer and would work part time when I was in town through the early 1990s. I learned the whole process simply through observation. In 1989 I decided that they needed to computerize the whole ordeal. I had worked part time as a temp writing accounting programs for a cash register company near Boston, so I wrote an accounts receivable program that was a drop in replacement for the mechanical posting machine. They still used the same statement forms and ledger cards. The program ran on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II that I picked up for 50 bucks.

The computer has been replaced twice since then but they are still using the same program today. It runs on a snappy 286. They’ve been having issues with the system over the past month or so so I drove up to do some maintenance on this ancient computer and software. They had also lost the capability of doing backups because the 5.25-inch floppy drive had died.

Rummaging around through the old computers I found a replacement floppy drive and after about an hour of work I had the system up and running once again. Talk of upgrading was minimal, because if it ain’t broke there’s no sense in fixing it. I think it’s ready to last another 15 years.

While hunting through files I found some of the old backup floppy disks from the first computer. I thought it’d be amusing to compare the size of the floppy disk with the size of a CD or DVD in use today. The first computer used the larger 8-inch floppy disks. They didn’t hold much information.

Even though I am a geek through and through, and I’m sure that is quite apparent on my blog, I try not to focus too many blog entries purely on technology. Let’s face it, purely technologically themed entries can be boring for the casual reader. But, I need to get something off of my chest.

I am a Mac user. I love all my Macs. We have six of them in the house, along with a small armada of Linux based machines. I abandoned Windows as my primary platform ages ago, mostly because I was sick of anti-virus software slowing my system down and quite frankly because I was bored with the whole XP experience. For the most part I love OS X as a desktop platform. It’s easy to use and it allows me to do great things in a Unix-y sort of way. It’s not as customisable as I’d like it to be but you do what you can do.

I also have two iPods and an iPhone. I have been asked on countless occasions about my iPhone and if I love it. My answer is always “sort of”. I love the concept of my iPhone, a.k.a. having the internet in my pocket, but in some respects moving from my Motorola Razr to my iPhone last year was a step backwards. I can no longer receive multimedia messages from my friends, I can’t send a multimedia message to my friend’s cell phone (I have to send to their e-mail address) and I can’t take video on the iPhone. These key points (to me) were not rectified with the release of the iPhone 2.0 software last week. Am I going to buy the new version of the iPhone? Nope. Am I ever going to buy another iPhone? Nope.

I have also faithfully kept my .Mac account year after year. I occasionally use the e-mail services, though over the past year I’ve been primarily using gMail. I was very excited about the conversion of .Mac to MobileMe. MobileMe promised the nirvana of services – my computers (Mac and PC based, if I had any), my iPhone and the web interface would all be instantly sync’d with one another. Since the launch of MobileMe mid last week, I still can’t get to all parts of the MobileMe service nor does my iPhone sync reliably with my iCal on the web interface. The biggest insult to me is that while Macs (naturally) and PCs can get to the web interface using Firefox or Safari (and Internet Explorer, to some extent), Apple has not given any sort of access to Linux users. None. I can tell Apple that my Linux browser is a Windows browser and it’ll work just fine, so there’s no reason that a Linux computer can’t use MobileMe, they just choose not to have it work. In addition, Linux is not part of the whole “sync scheme”. Even Microsoft is writing a Linux client for their Live Mesh services. This makes me crazy.

Now folks will go on and on about how Apple had a bigger response than anticipated during the MobileMe and iPhone launches. However, MobileMe undoubtedly runs on Xserve and/or Leopard OS X Server. Apple is aggressively going after the Enterprise/business class user market. If Apple’s servers can not hold their own for the company that created them, why on earth would I want to invest in Apple products for my own company’s server needs? When Earl and I purchased new MacBook Pros back in the spring, we paid a premium price for pretty much the same hardware that I could have had for half the price from Dell, HP or Gateway. Granted, I wouldn’t be getting the “Apple experience” via OS X, however, I can come pretty damn close that experience AND have control of my own destiny as it were with Ubuntu Linux and more powerful while less expensive hardware. Why wouldn’t corporations and business users do the same exact thing? If Apple can’t keep their services running on their own hardware and software, why do I think that they would be able to do the same for my business?

Then we have the iPhone launch. Please. As a geek that works in telecommunications, I can tell you that AT&T is acting like their other Baby Bell brethren in coming up with ridiculous pricing, billing and activation procedures. I hear O2 in the UK required Windows Internet Explorer to activate your iPhone with them. I’m not surprised. AT&T and their Baby Bell brothers and other counterparts have tunnel vision: they know one way to do something and if you deviate from that path, even by an inch, you’re screwed. So this whole activation in the store/be iReady for the AT&T visit/etc thing they had going on is no surprise to me. That’s what AT&T does. It’s a shame that Apple had to saddle up so tightly with this company to get their phone out there.

By the way, since upgrading to iPhone 2.0 I now must make most phone calls twice and my reception is about 2/3 of what it was before. Battery life bites the big one. Tips tell me to “turn off my Wi-Fi” and to “turn the brightness all the way down” to save battery life. If I wanted to use my phone in the dark and away from the internet, I would have stayed in the closet years ago.

Am I going to buy another Apple product again? Yes. Will it be a large investment? No. I don’t see a new iPhone in my future, ever. I don’t see a new Mac in my future, ever. My MacBook Pro hardware is not as good as my PowerBook G4 was. Am I going to renew .Mac/MobileMe? Nah. I can get the same services for free or I can make my own server in the cloud. Will I continue to recommend Apple products for casual computer users? Yes I will, because for those that aren’t as technologically savvy, I still feel that Mac is the best way to go.

So I’m in pure geek mode this week. I’m relatively obsessing on my armada of computers at the house. I have an excuse, it’s coolest in the cellar and I can’t think of a better way to beat the heat than to spend time in the cellar doing things I love to do.

This is a test post from my Linux computer to see if the free software Drivel fits the bill. So far, so good.

I added a computer to the studio this afternoon. I found a really good deal on a display computer at Best Buy whilst I was browsing around. I had been toying with the idea of adding a Linux desktop to the stable and this computer was perfect for the project so I made the purchase.

The new computer is made by eMachines and has a decent AMD 64-bit processor with 1GB RAM. It has room for upgrades which I’ll most likely being doing over the next year or so as needed. I have it running OpenSuSE Linux 11. I’m liking the experience thus far. It’s good to have a computer to play with without mucking up the Macs too much as I tinker.

One of my favorite aspects of my job is to occasionally do work in one of our central offices. There are a lot of wires and electrical connections and fun pieces of equipment. It’s a network geek playground.

Flickr Link.