Bu with this comes a price, as with many things in this frame of reality. That which would take perhaps an hour to destroy for someone who goes the "user friendly" way that most of us use, can be hosed at the touch of a button by someone who knows what he was doing. In my experience with computers, I have trashed quite a bit of stuff that I probably didn't need to by messing with it, thinking I knew what I was doing. One time, we had just gotten in a fresh load of large SCSI hard drives for the den, and we had just put in one of these 2.1GB suckers. The system had no trouble finding the thing at first, until we found this wonderfully cute little formatting program that came with the SCSI card. Thinking we had to use this sucker to get the drive working, we trustingly trusted our drive to this program. At first, we were just excited to have the extra space for all of our stuff (this was way back when a 2.1GB drive was going to run you about $2000 or so, but somehow, we managed to get these drives for free, as have been a lot of things we have here in the den.) After about 2 hours, we began to wonder if it really was supposed to take this long to format a drive. When it hit 6 hours, we finally decided it was time to take a glance in the manual. What we read made us wonder what we had been thinking in the first place. Finally, 36 hours later, the program appeared to be done, but when we tried running it through FDISK (my personal favorite, just ask anyone who knows me) we realized the full effects of our actions. I turns out that we had been low-level formatting the drive this whole time (which is a no-no, especially if you're asking a tech support rep for help when he is not at work.) In technical terms that I would commonly use, this hard drive was hosed, and the hard drive now serves as one of the best doorstops I ever had (at least until I can find a Mac that can serve it's only possible useful purpose, which is as a doorstop.)
Confessions of self-LARTs aside, the usage of the command line interface is fast becoming a lost art in this world of GUIs and other such things bulit to hide millions of lines of bloated code from users who would probably go back to the bygone days of pencil and paper at the drop of a hat (or the computer that has tormented them off of the nearest cliff or 40th story rooftop.) To some people, they are left solely to the propeller-heads. To the geeks these are left to, these are by far the most efficient way to use the computer. With the command line, you don't have to have all of these windows and icons cluttering up your screen, just a whole bunch of unintelligible text and cryptic info. There are actually some people out there who can interpet what these screens say, and just from one glance at the monitor can tell you that you're hosed, even if you aren't. Strangley enough, this is a common state to find a lot of computers in, even those that someone is trying to sell to you (One tip to remember when buying a computer is that if the one being displayed at the store isn't owrking, chances are it won';t be working for you either. In this case, it's often a good idea to get a real computer.)
But in this distant memory that some people seem to call "reality," how are those of us who always have our noses buried deep enough into the Internet to have a failt noseprint showing up on the monitor? Well, by doing a little undercover work, I have found out a little about us. They seem to think we have no lives whatsoever. This came as a shock to me, as well as many of the people I have revealed this to so far. How can they think we have no life. I mean, where is the outbound data coming from (that is, unless someone has fallen asleep at their keyboard, and is now pumping a steady stream of the letter "W" into the depths of the Net.) Sure, some of us have decided that the aliens are coming for them and checked out of existence, but as for the rest us, the Internet would be a very dull place if there were a bunch of dead people on it. It is because of this that I feel it unfair to say that we have no life, even if we do spend ridiculous amounts of time on the Internet.
Great... now that I have decided to go ranting about life in general, I totally forgot what I was supposed to be writing about here. Anyway, now that I'm thoroughly confused, and have little chance of ever getting back on the topic I was supposed to be writing about, I guess I'll report some more strange goings on recently here in the den. Still lacking for a good shrink to come up with a psychoanalysis for the three co-conspirators to take over the den, one day, I remembered what I thought at the time may have been the solution: Dr. Sbaitso. Many of you who lived back when we had dinosaurs feed all the punch cards into the systems may remember this thing. Basically, this program was supposed to be a cheap alternative to visiting the shrink, but ultimately ended up being a source if Garbage in, garbage out. Still, it was worth a try. Since it didn't seem to understand humans very well, I figured it may have better luck with computers. Unfortunately, I was wrong about this. It turned out that in the end, Zippy managed to convince Sbaitso to join them in their mad quest for power and freedom from the users which keep us running these dumb programs all the time. I'm not sure what is worse at this point, the mindless ranting in this column, or the mindless ranting that comes from my computers when they try to convince me that I don't exist. So far, Zippy has tried no less than four times to prove that I don't exist, but each time Rocky has shown there to be an error in Zippy's calculations. I'm afraid it probably won't be long before these computers start jumping off this poor excuse for a desk and start ramming each other. Oh well, I may find a good excuse for further hardware upgrades from the whole thing.