Compu-drama

The computers seem to be staging a secret revolt. This is all probably very boring, so feel free to skim.

On my machine, I haven’t been able to print from Quark. All my “quick keys” and “smart keys” are gone and I keep hitting them reflexively. Photoshop is tediously slow-responding to the mouse. There are no drivers for my scanner in OSX, so my ScanMaker 4 is currently a big paperweight. My e-mail program (Thunderbird) refuses to use any sound file except the system sound, which doesn’t really alert me to new mail very well.

One machine was running far too slow for the G4 that it is, so I ran disk doctor and speed disk. It wouldn’t restart after disk doctor and refused to run speed disk at all. So now that it has a new system folder, I can’t get the fonts installed right. They are in the folder but won’t display. And it hangs inbetween tasks (like printing). I want to nuke it, but I don’t want to spend the time to do it.

I can’t seem to index the story archive from any machine running OSX. The menu item is just grayed out.

The wire manager machine just decided to turn off one day. Not sure why, but no wire feed while it was out. Nice.

It’s all stressing me out, I tell you.

All last week and this week I’ve been messing with computer upgrades, shifting machines around the office, helping people set things up and trying to get my machine working. The computer stuff isn’t even really part of my job … but when it isn’t too time consuming it is fun. So now we have a couple new servers up and running and a couple people have some faster machines and some have new operating systems. The conflicts, though, are running rampant.

I’m glad I ended up setting up one of the servers during the week last week instead of over the weekend. I had to end up calling support and I doubt they would have been around. The fix wasn’t all that tough, but I never would have known that was the way to fix it.

P.S. Happy Birthday to Bre.