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Party like it's 95

30 06 09 - 19:20 Ah, the mid 90's, what a great time. Let's see, in 95 I graduated high school. Still had my lawn business. My computer was a Color Classic, the last floor model sold by Circuit City before they were bought out by CompUSA. David Benish suggested I buy that machine over the Classic II, for which I was grateful. Wonder what ever happened to that guy. He liked Macs more then even I ever did in high school. I wonder what happened to a lot of people I knew back then. Not enough to go to reunions, or anything, I don't want to SEE them, I just wonder what happened to them. Anyway, back to the Color Classic, I loved that machine, bought it an FPU and everything. What else? Oh yeah, a little OS from some tiny company named Microsoft came out, I guess it had a "recycle bin" that you could take files out of. Gee, hadn't been doing that since '84. And then there was Office 95.

Some people just can't give things up, you know. They just grab onto something and hold on tight. Me, I can't imagine using a program, especially a word processor, from fifteen years ago. But my first customer did. Her problem in her words was that she couldn't print. Well, one of her printers was unplugged, so yeah, might be tough. But her actual problem was that Word (95) was crashing when she went to print from it. (To add further irony to the situation, she was using a pirated version of the software.) Gee, wouldn't expect a program, written for an operating system that was "modern" half my life ago, to have any problems, would we?

In her defense, she also had Word 97, (which printed fine, by the way) but she couldn't use it because the document looked different between 95 and 97. Which I was very surprised about, MS will go out of its way to make formats incompatible (witness docx) but it does do a good job (or so I thought) of making sure things looked the same when they were opened. But I scrolled down to page 38 and yeah, it was different. So I told her, well, someday this machine IS going to not work anymore. Be it a motherboard failure, or a HD crash, or what, sooner or later you're going to have to move on from Word 95. So you might as well start reformatting your documents into something that's an actual standard, like OpenDocument, rather then something that's not a standard though people treat it like that because they are dumb, like doc.

She runs a law office specializing in helping people get divorced. The office doesn't even have a connection to the internet. How can you run a law office without being able to email stuff? Or look things up? The Internet is like my eight sense (Sight, Sound, Taste, Touch, Smell, Balance, ESP, Internet) so I can't see how people can get by without it anymore. Weird.

Just at Sean's last Saturday, we were wondering something... geese, what was it? Anyway, he was looking up something we all wanted to know, and I was all like "hey, don't you miss that twenty minute trip to the library to look crap up?" and he was all like, "yeah, that was the best!"

Then I get to go back to the hotel I work for, yet another machine has malfunctioned. And once again, it's running a pirated version of XP, and has a windows 2000 sticker on the side. MS would love to get their hands on this place. I began to think that maybe they had a site license for XP and just lost the paperwork? But poking around I found a file "Windows XP Pro SP2 Pre-Activated with Serial.torrent" and the actual 600MB iso file. So, yeah, someone torrented XP and started loading it up.

FOR A HOTEL.

I mean, come ON people. You've got to have some kind of ethics. Right? Am I totally wrong here? Should I help every Tom, Dick, and Quang break the law? Especially business? So I told her, no, I would not help her/the hotel continue breaking the EULA, no matter how much I hated windows. You have a Win2K sticker, that's what you're getting. She said fine, I only use office and some program called CaterEase or something. "Great." I replied. "Naturally you have the disks for these programs so I can reload them?"

What do you think?

I am astounded. Was their previous computer guy a moron? Was he three years old? There are no passwords, no records, no disks, no nothing. A place like that, which has bunches of employes, you have to keep detailed diaries of what's going on with every machine, and all disks and serial numbers, all receipts, etc. To do otherwise is just asking for trouble.

Stopped off at my mother's house to give them back the small shovel I forgot to give them (pooper scooper for dog) and got snacks! Lots of snacks, actually. If you ever get the opportunity to try Herrs chips or Wilbur chocolate, you won't be disappointed. Thanks for the snacks, Mom and Dad, you're the best. (And I don't mean that just because you bribed me with yummy food, no sir!)

Then back to the mortgage place I was at yesterday, the printer icon had disappeared. Weird. I put it back.

Then way out to Macedon, for more foolage. Hooked their router back up, everything was fine. It's okay, I love driving a million miles to do nothing.

Now I get to phone people. So I can have even more fun then this, tomorrow. Yup, just one bellyful of laughs after another. But hey, we're more then halfway to Christmas, that counts for something right?

Current Mood: Resisting the call of yummy snacks