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October 26, 2004
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11:45 PM - Moody Tues.
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As a corollary to Murphy's law, I propose the following:
"If something can be forced to go right, it will do so only after everything that can go wrong has gone wrong."
This lesson was hammered home for me this evening like a fitty-penny nail into a balsa-wood airplane.
I spent over an hour in preparation for the evening, attempting to install
any version of Real player on my laptop. This is more a challenge than
one might think, since the installer is fairly uncompromising on certain
points, such as free space on the C: drive. After going through three
uninstalls and three attempted installs (of various versions) I finally
found one that sucessfully reconfigured the registry into something
workable and allowed me to access password protected streaming audio. I
went to all this effort specifically to give myself the option to enjoy my
class time at an eatery with a wireless network.
I settled in at Panera just in time to enjoy a productive class session,
but my laptop could not properly access the wireless network, despite its
having done effortlessly on every previous occasion. Presumably, the
installation of Real Player somehow caused more harm than good. After
fifteen minutes of futile attempts at isolating the problem, I scarfed my
meal and sped home. My desktop worked perfectly well for about five
minutes, and then locked up hard as soon as I fired off a single answer to
the instructor. Exasperated, I rebooted the laptop and attempted to log
in. After wrestling about with M$IE for a bit, I managed to catch the
latter half of the class session.
I'd call tech support, but on this particular hardware/software
configuration, I'm it. The lesson here is clear enough -- do not count on
Microsoft to work in a pinch. I would suppose a professional reliability
analyst (or even an amatuer cynic) really ought to know better.
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