Medieval vs Technology

By Ray on March 24th, 2009

Helm So some of you probably wonder why for my escape I prefer the idea of, as someone recently put it, “dressing up and pretending be a guy swinging a sword around.” If you take a look at my daily dose of technological woes and worries it is no wonder I would prefer for my relaxation time to move back 600 to 700 years away from computer and find a time when technology was in general much simpler. After all the technology level of armor or weapon, while advanced for the time, generally either worked for you and you did well or it did not and you died. No gray areas or dumb things you have to do to get them to work. Yeah, for those wondering, I am about to gripe a bit about some technology issues…

First on my list is a couple of used CD’s I picked up just recently. The one was actually labeled as it had scratches, but my inspection said not to badly. My new laptop with fancy DVD writer handled ripping that one just fine, though my car stereo skipped a bit. The other one, that everything else has read just fine was not even recognized as a CD by the new system and I had to put out an old system with plan CD-ROM drive to get a ripped copy, my question why? Maybe too much more stuff in the drive to get slightly out of whack on a stuff that is slightly out spec or something?
As I left the house this morning the lights blinked, I thought little about it. Two miles down the road I start getting calls from the office of panicky natures – the power is out for the roughly downtown area including the main offices with the largest grouping of servers. We were on batteries, but they only last so long. Shut down as many non-essential systems as possible. Were just thinking of switching over to an emergency plan of some sort when the power came back up. Turns out we lost a drive out of an array somewhere in the initial surge and it knocked servers offline twenty miles away at another site as well, that I later had to bring back online.
One system limits a field to twenty characters that easily goes above that limit fairly easily, seemingly for no apparent real reason other than that is the cutoff that was chosen. If you go above that on a batch process it rejects that record out of hand for being non-compliant. The system the batch originates depends on having the full field of information in the database and is seemingly just as unwilling to do a truncation of the data field in between generation of that batch. Meanwhile I am left in the middle of the two along with the office personal wondering why I can’t just fix it for them to make it work.
The battery in my cordless mouse died in the middle of some of this major chaos and I had to replace that and then reset it.
I have a phone system that is admittedly dated having some major issues with seemingly getting one way throughput (ie I can hear you but you can’t hear me) on a fairly regular basis. The company that makes the system will not hear of support or technical assistance without and update to the system, despite it having worked along just fine for years without issue and really only the changing of some voice mail options being the only thing that has been changed.
The one server I need to do an install on does not have a DVD drive in it. The media for the installation is so large, it only comes in a DVD package now, so I have to conjure a share, copy files of that magnitude across the network. After I complete the install, I find out there is an upgrade package that arrived just today – same huge copy process must be duplicated again.
I have had two computers in two days supposedly just completely die, making a grand total of about five DOA machines in about four weeks time. And keep in mind I was completely out of touch for one full week of that time. I just don’t get it that I can use systems for years and never have issue in general, short of an occasional failed drive or power supply going out (which are what backups are meant for and they are both wear and tear items in the grand scheme of things).

So it is no wonder that I prefer to occasionally escape to where the biggest question of the day is did I get my girth tight enough to make that extra stretch to the right to land that blow in that guys open sweet spot over his right shoulder to the back of his head. All clear-cut and I tightened the girth so I know, nothing I am depending on but me at that piece of leather and the technology is pretty darn simple. Really, when you get down to it, just binary – yes it is going to hold or no I am going to fall.