How The Mighty Have Fallen

Launchcast: Driven by Rush.

I don't think I've ever mentioned the name of the company for which I work in this blog, and I don't intend to here. However, I don't think it's an exaggeration when I say that its name was once synonymous with leading-edge technological innovation. Hopefully, that is still the case. It's just the desktop computing environment for peons like me leaves a little to be desired.

A few weeks ago, the hard drive of my antiquated PC would no longer boot. Rather than replace the entire PC, instead, I got a new hard drive, which was imaged with the operating system and a bunch of other anti-virus and policy enforcement software that all good corporate PC users are supposed to be running on their system. (Gee, I wonder why this wasn't all on my hard drive before.) Anyway, this was a tad more than my 256 MB of memory could handle. For example, I could click on my Thunderbird window, go to the restroom, return, and the mail window would still be in the process of loading.

Not being able to take much of this, and having no internal way to improve the situation, I took action. To make a long story short, I went and bought a 128 MB memory card (with my own money, of course) installed it, and things are running much better. I'm not sure how many other major corporations have their employees secretly upgrading their own work computers at their own expense. But I figure that after two weeks, I'll more than make up for the investment in reduced frustration.

As a few other examples, I know I'm not the only one to perform a do-it-yourself memory upgrade. Another employee discovered that if he wanted a mouse with a center wheel, he had to buy one himself. And, I know of someone who has been bringing his own laptop to work and connecting it to the network, which may or may not be a violation of corporate policy (as if my other examples aren't).

I'm on a roll now, so there's one other thing I wanted to mention. Our external NNTP feed had been down for many months now. It was just restored, but the restoration may have been short-lived; time will tell. Of course, thanks to web-based USENET feeds such a Google Groups, NNTP may not really be needed. But I think its lack of availability says something. I mean, even though we didn't, we should be inventing things like NNTP, not wondering why we can't get a feed.

(If only we had the desktop computing environment of my part-time position at the Network!)

Launchcast: Tear-Stained Letter by Johnny Cash.