Even the Machines Are Against Me

I have been absent for 9 months, truly a pregnant pause. So where have I been and what have I been doing? The short answer is everywhere and everything. At least that is how it feels.

During the past year I have seen four family members experience hospitalization, two experience unemployment, and one experience death. The company for which I work has been forced to make significant changes that include eliminating many jobs. Those of us remaining must work harder and smarter in order to maintain the profitability on which our survival depends. That means the professional staff must work longer hours when necessary. Indeed I have put in my share of 44-48 hour weeks during the past year.

The political climate has been an irritation too. Our nation has enjoyed few encouraging signs during the past twenty years and things continue to worsen. I lived through the Nixon years and remember how people reacted to his use of power. I now know Nixon was an amateur compared to the people in charge now. For the first time in my life politics is becoming time consuming. But let’s save that topic for another day.

I have also had to do battle with my old nemesis the computer. In one instance I think it may have been my fault and I learned a lot from the experience. For example I learned the value of my Norton Save and Restore program that allowed me to restore the entire system after I crashed it. I was lucky and did not lose any data. And so for the past several months in addition to being otherwise occupied I was also dealing with a rather strained relationship with my computer.

Shortly after the new year started I began to notice that Internet Explorer was slowing down. Initially I blamed my internet provider but when I checked Windows Task Manager I observed that the page file usage was about 500MB higher than normal. The standard rebooting sequence temporarily cured the problem but over time the usage would again increase and sometimes exceed 1GB. This is kind of like watching the temperature gauge go up on your automobile.

This is the first time I have experienced problems with IE7 and I have generally been quite content with its performance. An attempt to use IE8 late last year was a disaster for pretty much the same reason and so I returned to IE7. Part of me thinks that IE8 made permanent changes in the system and that is now affecting the performance. I solved the problem by switching to Firefox which cured all of the computer resource issues but there are IE features I miss. It is much easier to manage cookies with Internet Explorer and my Firefox does not allow me to change bookmark icons or at least I haven’t figured out a way to do it.

For some reason all the computers in my life have become more problematical during the past several months. My employer leases Dell computers and the most recent generation machine is somewhat buggy. For example one of the computers is connected to both our GC-MS (gas chromatograph with a mass spectrometer detector) and the headspace analyzer with a 40 position auto sampler that allows us to run samples overnight when the instrument would otherwise be idle. The old computer worked flawlessly but the new one keeps disconnecting the auto sampler. Fortunately most of my runs have been on single samples, but at some point I will have to request the services of our IT department to correct the problem. I would have called them already but I know they are currently dealing with other more critical issues due to a switch in the Enterprise Resource Planning software the company is using along with the integration of two previously separate companies.

Naturally the problem is sometimes unrelated to the computer hardware. Recently, the installation of service pack 3 for XP caused the communication between the PC and a digital camera on our microscope to cease. Apparently the drivers for Firewire were changed in the service pack. Imagine being the company receiving phone calls from hundreds of customers who want to know why their digital cameras suddenly stopped working. The company supplied an executable file to make the necessary changes and all is well again.

Just a few weeks ago I clicked on my Mathcad icon to start the program and saw the little hourglass appear for about two seconds and then nothing. The program simply would not open no matter what. The only change anyone had made on my computer was loading Chemdraw. I do not know of any issues with having Chemdraw and Mathcad both on the same computer but I can not think of anything else. I called IT and we re-installed Mathcad. It didn’t work. Finally I asked if it would be easier to take the computer and just start from scratch since all my files were backed up. This is pretty extreme but it worked.

I won’t bore you with the story about the security dongle that stopped working and ultimately cost me and my employer about 20 hours worth of productivity. Neither will I tell you right now about the crumby performance I am currently suffering through with my internet provider. I won’t share my negative experiences with the Microsoft Vista on my laptop because I haven’t spent enough time with it to have a problem. Either that or it isn’t as bad as everyone says. We’ll see.