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Sky vs The Machines
May. 29th, 2007 02:46 pmIn a completely unexpected turn of events, I've spent today having death-defying duels (or at least very serious discussions) with machines instead of writing my article.
I decided to do the laundry, which was clearly my first mistake. My mother has a new washing machine (did I mention that I'm in Kalgoorlie?), and I thought I would use it to wash things. Unfortunately, when I turned it on it started filling at a rate that suggested it was being supplied by the tears of angels (for the purposes of this story, angels rarely cry). After much undignified scrambling over the machine so that I could get at the taps, I worked out that the problem was not, in fact, that the tap just needed to be turned on more. Luckily, I worked out that the hot water tap was working. But! my mother's hot water is set so hot that it would probably incinerate clothes. So I ended up having to turn off the hot water heater, do the washing with hot water, then turn the heater back on. As is usual when I try to order technology around, it all turned out to be fairly simple and at the same time vastly more ridiculous than I expected.
And then I started installing Ubuntu on my mother's (hitherto ignored) laptop, which has taken far, far longer than seems necessary. Still, after various incomprehensible issues, I managed to get 7.10 going ok, which sorted out some issues that 6.04 was creating. In the process I had to delete the windows partition, because it someone became lost in the installing process. Once it was installed I fiddled around with it for a while and tried to make it as shiny and tempting as possible, so she'll start using it...I put on a pretty background, added skype, put some music and videos on, made sure that it can play mp3s.
Now I'm trying to get her walkman, a Sony mp3 player, working on it, and it's breaking my poor technologically illiterate heart. I have a Samsung player that plugs in and just goes. You can drag and drop files into it, it plays OGG and other formats without any fuss...it's just so easy. And then there's Sony, with its ridiculous requirement that you use its own software...which only comes with Windows. With Ubuntu, you can open the folder fine, you can drag and drop data into the player, and use it as a flash drive without any problems. But you can't play music, because it has no idea what's going on. Grrr! Still, I am determined not to be defeated. If necessary, I may swap my mp3 player for my mother's, so that I can make further attempts on this stupid, crippled gadget.
I decided to do the laundry, which was clearly my first mistake. My mother has a new washing machine (did I mention that I'm in Kalgoorlie?), and I thought I would use it to wash things. Unfortunately, when I turned it on it started filling at a rate that suggested it was being supplied by the tears of angels (for the purposes of this story, angels rarely cry). After much undignified scrambling over the machine so that I could get at the taps, I worked out that the problem was not, in fact, that the tap just needed to be turned on more. Luckily, I worked out that the hot water tap was working. But! my mother's hot water is set so hot that it would probably incinerate clothes. So I ended up having to turn off the hot water heater, do the washing with hot water, then turn the heater back on. As is usual when I try to order technology around, it all turned out to be fairly simple and at the same time vastly more ridiculous than I expected.
And then I started installing Ubuntu on my mother's (hitherto ignored) laptop, which has taken far, far longer than seems necessary. Still, after various incomprehensible issues, I managed to get 7.10 going ok, which sorted out some issues that 6.04 was creating. In the process I had to delete the windows partition, because it someone became lost in the installing process. Once it was installed I fiddled around with it for a while and tried to make it as shiny and tempting as possible, so she'll start using it...I put on a pretty background, added skype, put some music and videos on, made sure that it can play mp3s.
Now I'm trying to get her walkman, a Sony mp3 player, working on it, and it's breaking my poor technologically illiterate heart. I have a Samsung player that plugs in and just goes. You can drag and drop files into it, it plays OGG and other formats without any fuss...it's just so easy. And then there's Sony, with its ridiculous requirement that you use its own software...which only comes with Windows. With Ubuntu, you can open the folder fine, you can drag and drop data into the player, and use it as a flash drive without any problems. But you can't play music, because it has no idea what's going on. Grrr! Still, I am determined not to be defeated. If necessary, I may swap my mp3 player for my mother's, so that I can make further attempts on this stupid, crippled gadget.