Monday, April 21, 2008

Still here, and a slave to Microsoft

It's nearly the end of the semester, which means this:
  • Grading and more grading.
  • Correcting proofs for an essay that'll be coming out soon. Yes, it is worth reading those twice and carefully: I missed some things the first time around.
  • Thinking about the summer class.

    And did I say a slave to Microsoft? Picture this scenario:

    Students are giving an end-of-year presentation. They are a little nervous. They're using my computer to project things on the screen.

    The screen goes dark, and they look alarmed: "What did we do?"

    Nothing, apparently, but you know how Windows usually gives you a choice about when it's going to shut down to do some of its incessant updates, nagging you every 5 minutes until you shut it down? Not this time.

    The computer shuts itself down, warning that it needs to install the updates and that that'll take a while. The poor students have to finish without showing the things that they'd planned to show. I tell them it doesn't matter, and it doesn't, of course; that wasn't their fault.

    But wouldn't you think the Dark Lords of Redmond would contrive to do the updates at some time that isn't the middle of a work day?
  • 2 comments:

    Anonymous said...

    L.I.N.U.X.

    undine said...

    I know, I know. I've experimented wit h it a little bit but am still intimidated by the "just insert these 572 lines of instructions into the machine and the application will work just fine!" instructions that I keep running into.