August 12, 1994
Dear Everyone:
One of the advantages of being the
System
Administrator of all these Systems is that I often know what other
people's passwords are, either because I assigned them (and they haven't
been changed) or I can go into the System as Administrator and look them
up. What this means is that I can
be in more than one System, on more than one PC at a time, providing the
usual user isn't around.
This being summer time (in the Northern Hemisphere), a lot of people are
on vacation. So I can log into
“Miranda’s” PC and use it to import files into
Versatile.
Now that PC is locked up until
the import is finished, usually about an hour.
No problem.
I simply set my tea timer to
remind me to check that PC in an hour and move on.
Now I log into “Sally’s” PC and use it to transfer some humongous files
from the main frame computer to the Server.
Can't use that PC again until
each transfer is complete. So I
go into my own office and start working in
Paradox
with Phineas, my San Francisco PC.
This is what I did all day yesterday. It's
wonderful not having to wait for the PC to do one thing before you can
start another. (Studies show that
the average PC user gets impatient after 6 seconds.
Personally, I'm below average.)
On the other hand, I would
sometimes find myself in the hallway, asking, "Who am I; where am I
working; and what am I doing there?"
This is definitely better than Nicholas, my “Livermore” office PC.
Compared to Phineas, who is a
486, 66 megahertz
with 8 megabytes of RAM (random
access memory), Nicholas is only a
386 with a
pitiful 3 megs of memory. Even
Ogden, the laptop I use at home has more memory than Nicholas.
Furthermore, Nicholas really
hates his
Memory
Manager. When I turn him on
in the morning, he gets into a fight with the memory manager and starts
yelling, "Bad Command or File Name! Beep!
Beep!
Beep!"
Then he sulks until I get him a
soft boot. Sort of like Mom
trying to pry us all out of bed in time for school each morning.
Based on the past week, I definitely think I need at least two PCs in
each office in order to achieve my full potential of productivity.
On the downside, I've been working in
Windows so
much lately that I'm developing “mouse arm".
That's when you've been using the
muscles in your arm and wrist to control the mouse so much that they
begin to ache.
In order to get all the information into
Versatile
that already stored in CRMIS, I go through Paradox for Windows.
I have a file (table) that
contains CRMIS data. I link this
table to another containing the CRMIS Box Numbers which
Versatile requires to do the
import. Then I export the result
to a file that Versatile can
read.
With over 300,000 boxes, that's a lot of bytes to crunch through.
You can actually
hear Phineas munching his way through two 60,000-record files,
comparing each line of each file to every line in the other file.
I wouldn't even think of asking
Nicholas to try it. He'd
have a stroke.
On second thought, maybe I should ask for
three PCs per office.
Movies…
Still haven't had time to see
Forrest Gump,
but we will.
Saw
Clear and
Present Danger last week. This
is the latest
Harrison Ford movie based on another
Tom Clancy
novel.
Men in power in Washington decide
to go after South American drug lords, even if it happens to be illegal.
It seems the law doesn't apply to
them because they're smarter than Congress and the Constitution put
together. Sound familiar?
Ford plays the CIA Deputy Director who finds out what's going on and
must decide whether or not to do something about it, and if so, what.
The plot is much simpler than the
book (half is missing), or it would have to be a mini-series to rival
the length of
Shogun.
They've beefed up Ford's role (he
is the star, after all) and cut way back on the character of
John Clark, played by
Willem Dafoe.
So if you've already read the
book, don't worry; you still won't know what's going to happen.
I liked the book better (Clancy does great
BART-riding books), but the movie is
still worth watching. Ford and
Dafoe are great. And there is a
computer whiz who can crack a password faster than you can open the
cookie jar. We even spotted that
obscure director's
brother Theodore.
Kid gets around.
Videos…
Striking
Distance.
Bruce
Willis "thriller" that bombed at the box office for good reason.
He plays a cop on the skids who
is convinced he's the only person to catch a serial killer.
The killer is so obvious that I
kept telling myself, "It can't
be him. He's too
obvious!" But I was wrong.
Thoroughly passable.
Live Wire.
Pierce
Brosnan as an explosives expert who suspects that his wife may be
playing around with the very guy he's assigned to protect.
Ben
Cross, who showed such promise in
Chariots of
Fire, and has gone steadily downhill ever since, is the bad guy.
Second rate soap with
unnecessarily graphic special-effects originally made for HBO.
Skippable unless you like Brosnan.
Vacation next week. Back at work
the week after.
Love, as always,
Pete
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