Some one-sentence summaries

Happy Boxing Day, dear readers, and I hope you all had a good Christmas. My time abroad may be over, but I still have plenty to write about, whether or not anyone's willing to listen. It's always nice to return home every so often to catch up with family and high school (or even grade school) friends. I know that it can be slightly unpleasant to return home to find your room's been redecorated and IKEAified, as I did, or find that it's not even "your" room anymore. (Christina? How's that working out?) But, you get used to it eventually. This disgustingly mild early-spring-esqe weather has had the upside of not distracting from the many many things needing doing that've been piling up around here in my absence, such as preparing for an onslaught of relatives in this house tomorrow. Looks like we'll have to just play ball hockey next door instead of the real stuff on the canal. This may be the first Christmas break in my memory where no natural ice was to be had, anywhere, at all. Oh, and I still haven't worked out an escape plan from the house for New Year's, so if anyone's planning something, let me know. I'll be back in G.R. on the 2nd and I don't yet have a place to live. I'm hoping the situation will somehow work itself out.

Hey Mom, a quick question

Do you have any suggestions for getting blood off of walls? And could you write back soon? We're in kind of a hurry.

...What? Oh. Well, earlier this fall, we still had a lot of mosquitos buzzing around the room at nights, so we'd smack a couple of 'em each evening before going to bed, with each one leaving a little red mark which meant "success".

You were concerned, you say? Why, what were you thinking?

Dear Professor Fetzer

It's Monday again, which means it's been a week since that 6-page paper for your literature class was due. Everyone else in the class has finished it and handed it in, except me. Mine is still in the process of being written. Now I could give you any number of excuses for why I'm so late with this, but I won't. The fact is, I couldn't give a rat's hindquarters about how authors in communist-governed countries wrote to give themselves identities outside the bounds of how the government defined them, and there is nothing in the world that can change that. Not even, apparently, having lived in or visited the very places those authors are from.

This isn't a slight on your teaching in any way. I've been able to understand the significance of what we've learned in class, and even enjoy some of the books we were given to read. I'm sure I've been able to contribute to the class discussions in a meaningful way, and I know you've appreciated the one-page papers I wrote for each book. But, the fact remains that my core interests lie elsewhere. I would rather teach myself how to code in Objective-C, or write about consumerism and why it annoys me, or hone my photography skills. Maybe this is standard end-of-semester fallout, or end-of-off-campus-semester burnout. Or, and this is more likely, it could be the first stages of complete end-of-this-17.5-year-academic-career discontentment. I think you and everyone else around me should know that at some point in these last few weeks, I just stopped caring about school in general. (This is one of many signs that I am not cut out for grad school.)

So will this affect my grade? Probably. Will it bring down my GPA? I would not be surprised. Unless I defy my own odds and pull off a fantastic last semester in college, there is a good chance that I will graduate with a sub-3.0 grade point average, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows that it's been on a consistent downward slide since my doing so well with pulling a 3.5 during my very first semester. And will that harm my job prospects? Only if all my potential employers prize a good GPA above things like real-world experience, ability to adapt to new environments, interpersonal skills, critical thinking ability, and numerous other things which that number does not measure.

You see, over these last few weeks, my thoughts have largely shifted from topics like pending assignments and what's due this week, to much bigger things, such as what I'm going to do with my life once I get back home. I need an internship this spring. I graduate next May, and I know how fast the shift from graduate to unemployed and homeless is. In less than a year, I will be looking for an actual job, not just some temporary assignment to tide me over until school starts again. I've been thinking constantly about what kind of work I want to do. I've been seriously considering pursuing work opportunities very far from home, some that have very little to do with my major, now that I've gotten a taste for living overseas. I don't have a girlfriend, which makes my situation slightly less complex, but there is always the chance that things could change abruptly and without warning. I find myself thinking about these things every day, and it all gets in the way of my ability to focus on finding quotes in a book to support my thesis statement.

I know that you and any other teacher out there worth their salt understands the inherent inadequacies of how education is done in our society in terms of preparing us for the real world; we've talked about this informally before. For me, almost all of you have done your job in full, and I thank you for it. I'm now starting to move on. I am convinced that I am a markedly different person from who I was half a year ago.

But I will get that essay done. Right after I get some sleep.

Implications of being the "computer guy"

For this group, I am the de facto technical person. The go-to guy for solving computer problems. The one who does everything from helping people print to diagnosing and, hopefully, resurrecting dead computers or other electronica. You know, that guy.

My first success this semester was setting up Professor Fetzer's printer at his apartment, which I might add has since been printing without fail, and I've had a long and illustrious career since then. My successes so far include:

• configuring the only WiFi-equipped Calvin laptop to function as a wireless internet router
• setting up printers in the dorm and installing the necessary drivers all over
• getting Sarah's music player to play nicely with WMP
• figuring out how to get Nate's music out of SonicStage and its evil OpenMG format
• installing a userContent.css file on Nate's installation of Firefox that blocks banner ads
• getting Cari's inexplicably dead laptop working again, after a disassembly
• setting up wireless printer sharing (not that it ever worked reliably, so no one used it...)
• showing how to get around region-coded DVDs with VLC
• scores of little problems, solved (or at least diagnosed)

I always know right away when someone's about to ask me to fix something or lend assistance. It's usually when I'm in the kitchen when I hear a timid voice behind me, saying, "Um, Eric?" in a tone that says "I realize that I am not worthy to make such an ambitious request, but I humbly ask for your wisdom in my inconsequential matter. I hereby submit my electronics to your knowledge, which knows no bounds." I'm sure that this isn't what you're implying, this is just how it sounds to me.

Now I know I'm not always the cheeriest person to be around, so may not always obvious that I'm happy to help out. It's not just for the ego boost that comes from the gratitude and people standing in awe of my tech-fu skills, it's more because this is how I can best give back to the group that's had to live with me these last few months. There's other ways I can give back, like keeping a comprehensive photo and video record of the whole trip and distributing a DVD of everything afterwards, but that's usually not appreciated until much later.

I do this sort of thing as part of my job at the ITC. A lot of what I've learned there has to do with how to help people without coming off as an egotistical jerk bent on making people feel as stupid as possible, best accomplished by having a good attitude and not shoving the user aside and doing the fix without explaining anything. (They've shown us clips of SNL's "Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy" during annual training as examples of what not to do. The scary thing is, I can understand everything that Nick says.) Although I've also been working with computers and electronics since my age was in the single digits, it's not the raw knowledge I've gained since then that's been most valuable, but a knack for troubleshooting. By that, I'm talking about an ability to know what might be causing a given problem, and how to narrow it down to a single source by seeing what still works and what doesn't. Everything else is just details; it has nothing to do with any inborn abilities of mine, and everything to do with how I live and breathe this stuff every day.

What few people seem to realize is that with such a guru-like position, unofficial as it may be, comes a degree of pressure and responsibility. The first thing I think when someone comes to me with reports of bizarre computer behaviour, the first thought to enter my head is always, "Crap, I hope it wasn't because of something I did! All I did was install some security updates/run Ad-Aware/move it a foot to the left!" No matter how innocuous the change, there is always a possibility that some strange new behaviour will manifest itself. Even if such behaviour is perfectly normal and logical or has nothing to do with anything I did, if it's unfamiliar, it is a Bad Thing for a user.

But such incidents are rare. For example, I can confidently say that the fact that one of our laptops now blanks out whenever the screen is moved even a smidgen has nothing to do with the security updates I'd installed the day before. That is a hardware problem, and the time it chose to show up was a complete coincidence. It's certainly not the only hardware failure we've had lately. That laptop we've been using as a wireless router? A few days ago it decided that its ethernet jack no longer exists, and I have no clue of how to get it to work properly. (The Calvin helpdesk suggested that I re-image it. Tell me, what's wrong with this proposed solution?) That same machine's USB ports are also very dead and have been for a while. If it didn't have a wireless card, there'd be no way of getting our dozens of documents off of it, short of transplanting the hard drive to another machine. Oh, and just tonight, the sound input jack bit the dust. Did someone accidentally run selfdestruct.exe?

What's worse than the problems you can see are the ones you can't. Everyone's been lectured about not opening suspicious attachments, phishing emails, keeping your firewall and virus protection turned on, and the like. But did you know that failure to take adequate security precautions with your Windows installation could lead to your computer being compromised in four minutes or less? In fact, your computer could be a part of a worldwide network of zombie machines controlled by some guy in Russia that is used to send spam or launch denial-of-service attacks against sites that refuse to pay protection money. Spam! Botnets! Zombies! Malware! Be AFRAID, people! Ha ha, only serious; what you don't know can hurt you and everyone else on the internet.

The fact remains that despite my best efforts to keep everything running smoothly, there is always a risk that if something goes wrong after I've been on the machine, me and whatever I did are right away suspected of having caused it somehow. I always fear that some unfortunate string of incidents will lead to someone saying to me, "Look, I appreciate what you're trying to do here, but please, don't touch my computer anymore; something bad always happens after you do!"

All this is only exacerbated by how we've been around each other and have been known to get rather fed up with each other now and then. I'm trying to stay on people's good side, and I don't doubt that I'm the only one.

How appropriate... I dozed off while writing this, and woke to find a hand-written request for help with a frozen iPod. The first thought that came to my mind was "Why ask me? You must think there's something that can be done, or you wouldn't have asked for help in the first place. So why not search for "reset frozen ipod" and use any of the 144,000 results that comes up?" Go see for yourself. Every one of the links on the first page of results has the solution. But of course, that's only my way of approaching such a problem. In the short discussion I had with Aron and Rachel, who happened to be in the room at the time, we had concluded that:

• figuring out the solution to a problem on one's own is not always an ego boost like it is for me,
• asking someone else for help is only an ego hit if you consider yourself to be smart in the field your problem is in,
• people will tend to avoid situations that make them feel confused or unintelligent, and
• sometimes asking the resident guru is the easy (lazy?) option. (Subsequent conversations also revealed that asking the all-powerful Google is not a everyone's first resort for problem-solving.)

As if to drive the point home, while I was standing there talking, someone else came in and asked for help with getting a document printed.

One thing I stress over and over when helping people, especially if they're frustrated, is that "When you have problems with technology, it's not because you're incompetent, but because the technology has been poorly designed. Hardware and software should function in a way that meets the needs of its users, but all too often, it functions in a way that requires users change their ways to meet the needs of the technology, or the designers, or the company marketing department. This is not your fault. ALWAYS blame the technology!"

I'm hoping that such a mindset will spur people on to seek ways of getting the technology to work for them, instead of giving up and adapting themselves to the technology's inane demands.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I hope that everyone reading this post will etch this phrase into their brains. The more that people see how computers and other advanced technology is not magic, the clearer it will become that it can be bent to serve their needs. I encourage everyone to take a moment to think about what annoys them while using their computer. Viruses? Pop-up ads? Spam? The fact that your box will get slower as time passes until it's so unusable that you're expected to buy a new one in a year? Heck, most of the time, people don't even tag these things as annoyances at all - they just accept it as a fact of life when using computers. It doesn't have to be that way! Anyone who has installed Firefox and ditched IE completely, or extended a proverbial rude gesture to Microsoft by switching to the Mac knows what I'm talking about. I guarantee that if you invest a little time in learning a new way of doing things, you will find that the small workflow adjustment was worth it. YOU WILL NOT GO BACK.

Ah, but if this is my lot in life, I am fine with that. I remember having teachers in high school who would freely admit that they were technically ignorant and were staying that way to fend off questions of that nature. Helping people make technology work for them? I revel in it. I wonder if that's my calling.

So much paper...

What do you get when one of your Hungarian professors (or his/her assistant) is unaware of PowerPoint's ability to print handouts of slideshows with multiple slides per sheet?

That's right: a few more forests wiped off the face of the earth, and a huge dent in the department's budget for toner cartridges.

To quote Edward Tufte in Wired: "Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."