Now is the Autumn of My DisContent

After deciding that I was not egocentric enough to blog habitually, I am drawn back to it in order to rant. Rant about computers and the like. My father died in November of 1999 and although he had been very comfortable with technology previously he was happy to sign off before Y2K. During the last months of his life he spoke about how technology was getting in the way of living. Tonight I couldn't agree with him more.

Laura, my daughter innocently approached me about printing photos for a geometry assignment. Now I have a new PC running Vista with a lot of preloaded software, including sales pitches from software vendors I have no interest in. Who knows what happened but it was no less than three hours after I began that I finally succeeded in printing said photos. In between the new PC refused to recognize my camera and demanded a driver that I did not have. I then tried printing directly from camera to fancy schmancy printer/scanner/copier/fax machine only to have it choke. Not to be deterred I took the camera to Laura's PC and downloaded the photos, then pulled out a thumb drive and tried to copy them onto it. The trial version of Corel said it was no longer valid (I didn't know I even had it) but I managed to get the photos on to it anyway. When I went back to my flashy new Vaio it refused to read the thumb drive and subseqently lost track of every USB device I had. Thumb drive directly in printer/scanner/copier/fax machine resulted in an error. Finally, frustrated MAB went back to Laura's machine, which by now had mysteriously lost all connectivity with the outside world. After rebooting it, I uploaded the photos to Flickr and then went back to said Sony and downloaded them and printed them. Did you follow all of that? Did I mention here that I am supposed to be comfortable with computers?!