February 5, 1998
Dear Everyone:
Last weekend, I ran a
Database Integrity
Check against
Versatile and
it passed with flying colors.
So I guess we can breathe a sigh of relief, put it all behind us,
and get ready for the next problem, which is looming in on us even as we
speak, not unlike the series of rainstorms that’s been sweeping through
Northern
California the past few weeks.
The next problem is called “GIL”.
(Rhymes with “kill”.)
GIL stands for “Global Information Link” and now you know as much as you
did before. What is GIL?
It’s an attempt to get everyone in Company (30,000+ people) all
on the same page as far as computing is concerned.
Everyone will have the same machine (more or less).
Everyone will have the same software applications (more or less).
And (nearly) everyone will be prevented from making any changes
to their new machine once they get it.
This is supposed to cut down dramatically on the
cost of maintaining and servicing computers.
Many computers develop problems because their users add programs
that are incompatible with other programs, causing the machines to crash
(not a pretty sight). GIL
takes care of this by preventing the user from adding new software or
downloading some piece of “shareware” from the
Internet.
If you want to use a software application, you first have to
justify it, then have it tested, “integrated” and finally “certified” by
GIL.
Anybody out there ever read
George Orwell’s
1984?
GIL is
Big Brother.
However, at the moment, Big Brother is chock full
of what you might call “bugs”.
In “Livermore” and the Library alone, we have hundreds of
software applications that need to be “tested, integrated and certified”
before we “get GIL’d”. The
Library is scheduled to go GIL in three short weeks.
By that time, all our special applications, like
Sydney Plus, which the Library
uses to catalog and track publications, have to be integrated.
And there are exactly four of us to do all that
integrating. So you can see
where we’re going to be very busy for the next two months.
Two months because:
During February, we need to get all those applications ready.
During March, we need to recover from switching to a totally new
computing environment and getting all new “standard” software, i.e.,
Microsoft’s
Office 97.
Or, as “Murray” puts it, “This is in keeping with
our tradition of always being shot down in the spring by the
Information Technology people.”
Last February, they threw us into
Windows 95 with
very little preparation, resulting in people being down for weeks until
the overall system stabilized.
Hopefully, GIL will go more smoothly.
(Oh, look!
Another pig
just flew past the window.)
In other news...
“Jeannie” would like it on the record that she has
picked the last two movies and both were very good picks, indeed.
This time, the movie is Zero
Effect. (Also, for
the record, she picked it after I pointed out to her that it had
received a surprisingly favorable review in the
San
Francisco Chronicle.)
There are two very good reasons to go and see this movie.
Reason Number One: It
was filmed almost entirely on location in
Portland, Oregon.
And you get to see quite a lot of Portland because one of the
characters keeps being sent on a series of wild goose chases that
involve wandering all over the city.
Reason Number Two:
It’s a very intelligent and clever movie.
Bill Pullman
plays Daryl Zero, a kind of modern
Sherlock Holmes
type of character. He is
heavily into objectivity and observation (“the two ob’s” as he calls
them). This works in his
profession as a private investigator.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t help him much when he’s not working
because then he’s a total mess.
He lives behind locked doors, eating tuna fish out of the can
with a plastic spoon he picked up off the floor.
He has disguises on top of disguises.
He has more aliases than a city phone directory.
There is one brief scene in which he mentions his childhood and
suddenly, all his dysfunctional behavior makes absolute sense.
Zero has been hired by a millionaire, played by
Ryan O’Neal, to
find a set of missing keys and the identity of a blackmailer.
Zero sends his assistant on what appear to be wild goose chases
of their own. Then, armed
with facts and observations, Zero twists himself up like a pretzel and
stares at nothing until the solution to the problem just pops up in
front of him.
All the clues are right there for the audience to
see, but there are some delightful twists and turns leading up to the
conclusion. This is the kind
of movie you want to go see; and then you can’t wait for the video to
come out so you can run it back and forth, looking for the clues that
are so obvious once you know what they are.
For the record, I figured out who the girl really
was a good fifteen minutes before the guy behind us.
Love, as always,
Pete
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