June 6, 2007
Dear Everyone:
My laptop computer at work was one of the very first ones deployed in Global Information Link (GIL) 2, in 2002. Lately it had been getting v-e-r-y s-l-o-w. It got to the point where, if I tried to open a folder, I could expect to wait up to a minute for it to happen.
Now, you might be thinking, “One whole minute! Big deal.”
But multiply that one minute by 60 folders and now you’re wasting an hour per day. I finally reported it to the Help Desk to “make it go faster or replace it.” A technician came by to look at it. Her problem was that “nothing is broken”, meaning there was no part of the machine that she could replace with a newer part to make it better.
She opened a spreadsheet and pointed out that it opened quickly enough. I challenged her to start working in the spreadsheet and she discovered that, yes, she had to wait nearly a minute before the cursor would respond. Clearly my laptop was, to put it kindly, “dying of old age.”
She called her supervisor, then made an executive decision to replace the antique with one of the newer laptops. It would become my official computer and the old one would be “returned to surplus”, not that anyone would take it out of surplus for someone else to use. It was being “put out to pasture.”
In the meantime, I had borrowed one of our “pool” laptops, machines kept to be used by contractors when they worked on projects. This allowed me to get some actual work done while my laptop was spinning its wheels. But it meant having two machines, hooked together with something called a “hub”, on the desk. That didn’t leave a lot of desk space for anything else.
The new laptop arrived yesterday. I moved over to the huddle room, where I could get some work done on the pool laptop, while the technician worked on moving everything from the old machine to the new one. Every once in a while she would ask me to come over to log onto the new laptop so she could do something.
By the end of the day, I had my new machine. However, I wasn’t ready to give up the pool laptop just yet. I had a lot of Internet favorites to copy to a Word document so I could pull them up on the new machine and add them to favorites again. Finally, by this afternoon, I had returned the pool laptop and rearranged my desk to take the best advantage to the new machine.
I have not yet given it a name. (The old one was Phineas.)
In other news…
“Jeannie” and I actually went to a movie last Saturday. Kevin Costner plays the title character in Mr. Brooks. He plays a very successful businessman named Earl. Earl has a problem. In fact, he stands up at AA meetings and pronounces, “My name is Earl. And I’m an addict.”
He allows his fellow attendees to assume that he’s addicted to painkillers or some kind of narcotic. What Earl is addicted to is killing people. William Hurt portrays the voice in Earl’s head, urging him to kill, telling him how much he will like it.
Earl is a very smart man, he just happens to be a sociopath. He is usually very careful, planning every step, forcing himself to give up souvenirs that might implicate him. But one night, he makes a tiny mistake.
And pretty soon a very smart police woman, played by Demi Moore, is closing in on him. But Earl has a talent for turning a problem into a brilliant opportunity. And before you know it, what looked like nothing more than an obvious red herring suddenly turns into a significant plot device.
It’s not easy to want Earl to get caught. On the other hand, you don’t really want him to get away with it. And, in the final analysis, he doesn’t. But if the movie makes enough money, the ending has sequel written all over it.
In other news…
“Frankie” and her daughter, “Liza”, arrive in the
Bay Area
this Friday. We have a
weekend filled with planned activities.
Then, next Wednesday, they, “Jeannie” and I will drive up to
So no Letter next week.
Love, as always,
Pete
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