Flutterby™! : Windows hates me 2000-11-14 00:46:44+00

Windows hates me

2000-11-14 00:46:44+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

I had started to see a use for Windows. Counterstrike had me convinced that there was a real purpose for it. And Todd went out today and bought us these nifty headsets with channel controls and everything to lift our spirits while we were at a client meeting; it's got nifty controls to manage channels and drivers to do some voice recognition and stuff. Everyone else's installations went fine, my install, on a generic Windows box that's always worked when other people have installed stuff on it, failed miserably, and in different ways each time. Best theory thus far is that the voice recognition stuff targeted me as a Linux bigot and crashed on me. Windows hates me.

Maybe there is something similar to a bogon that only affects "user friendly" operating systems like Windows. I first noticed this when I tried to use a Mac a few years ago and found out that I could only do it by smoking about an ounce of marijuana. Basically I had to completely disable the rational portion of my brain in order to operate the computer. I also ran into a similar problem when I was administering NT and IIS for BlueCross: the answer to so many problems was to reboot the machine, but coming from a Unix background, that was not seen as an answer, but more a symptom of a bigger problem. Your extended exposure to Linux shell prompts, I believe, has caused you to emit 'shellon' particles which cause irreparable damage to GUIs. Anytime you are using the mouse more than the keyboard you are likely to crash the system... Actually, I would bet it's as simple as that. There are bugs in the keyboard shortcut code in the install program. You are using the keyboard shortcuts because you tend not to use the mouse exclusively (like Windows and Mac users). Almost no one, especially the testers at Microsoft, ever really thought of trying to use the keyboard shortcuts all the way through the install...

I think you might be on to something with the "shellon" particles. It was really creepy, cause I made Dan sit in the corner of his office with his laptop while trying to reinstall and as soon as he started talking the Blue screen of death occured <creepy>.... and now that I think about it the Xserver on server room boxes stopped working after Mr. Lyke was touching it....hmmmm

Actually, it's not the keyboard shortcut theory, 'cause having written a couple of Windows installs myself I know that using the accelerator keys and keyboard shortcuts is a bad idea. Especially since my fingers are mapped for Unix systems where the meta (ummm... excuse me... "alt") key doesn't usually pull down the visible menu, so I tend to do completely bizarre things when my fingers do the talking...

Aaaaugh! Okay, so not only did installing that device make my Windows 98 box unstable, it seems to have completely hosed the NT which was dual-booted on that machine. Windows boxes need to be treated like consoles: Bought with the OS installed and all peripherals that you intend to use on that machine, and when you decide to upgrade anything give the whole thing to a Unix user and buy a new one.