16 November, 2006
The one where I hug my Macs
I have learned that pretty much every day, at some point, I'm going to have to battle my PC at work over some odd quirk that it's developed. The latest one is when I want to print to the big colour copier/printer, it now makes everything 2-sided. When I WANTED it to print double-sided, it flatly refused. Since I don't seem to have this problem on any of the other printers I use, I'm guessing that the drivers have some 1's and 0's mixed up. That's not to say there aren't problems printing to the other printers; frequently, I'll either click the printer icon, or ctrl-p and, before it spools to the printer, it jams every letter on every line over onto the left margin, so I have one big mash-up line down the left side of the page. The only way to "fix" it is to reboot.
And tonight, as I and a fellow NaNoWriMo'er were tapping away at our respective novels, a guy was trying to use the PC at Javarama. Whoever had been using the PC before had...well no one could figure out for sure what they were doing, but it was FUBAR. It took at least a couple of reboots before it was functioning again. Then, later, a woman who was sitting next to us was working on her laptop (I think it was a Dell...all I know for sure is it ran Windows XP--sort of), when, suddenly, she started cursing. Not loudly, like shouting, but quite audibly. Many f-bombs were dropped and many more "shit"s were flung at her hapless spreadsheet. From the tone of her voice, it would seem she hadn't been saving her work frequently. (Sorry, but if you're on any computer--but especially a Windows machine--if you don't save your work regularly, you're just asking for heartache).
It finally got to the point where her cursing was becoming a distraction and I was getting tired, so I saved my novel, closed Hamish the iBook up and furtively hugged him as I slipped him back in my bag. And when I got home, Fiona (the eMac) got a pat on the head as well. Yeah, I paid a hell of a lot more money for these computers than I would have had to for a comparable Windows box*, but they're worth every penny, just in the up time (Fiona's been up since the last software update a couple of months ago, and Hamish has been up since NaNoWriMo began on November 1st).
*which is not to imply that I believe Windows can compare to Apple in any way, shape or form.
~~ victoria on 9:30 PM ~~ 0 comments
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