What is best in life?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V30tyaXv6EI#t=0m23s
I contemplated this question early this morning while wrestling with a Power Point presentation that kept freezing up. There's a status meeting next week on a project I've been working on for the past couple of months, and I need to put together a presentation on progress. The project is a model rewrite and port to a large framework, and the integration is anything but trivial. We're closing on an early delivery and I'd like to capture lessons learned, limitations imposed by the mother sim, and what support and modifications I'll need to wrap it up.
Enterprise and Windows = Frustration and Pain
Coincidentally, a series of forced automatic systems updates left my work desktop in a quasi dysfunctional state of Power Point lockup, quasi because not being able to waste time with view graph-sterbation isn't necessarily a bad thing. Admittedly my desktop was installed with ancient variants of office (just upgraded from 2003), but I was able to force an upgrade to Office 2007, and will get back to work after banging out a few slides.
There's clearly an enterprise issue with updating system wide software. The complexity of state when dealing with many thousands of computers with different operating systems, patches, and software has lead to millions if not billions of dollars in cost for companies. But there's also a Microsoft issue. After completing the upgrade I was pointed to a windows search tool by Outlook. I installed the tool and immediately ran out of disk space on my c partition (60 Gbytes), causing my system's ancient drive to squeal in horror1. I was forced to roll back the installation in order to use my pc. I won't miss you when you're gone Windows.
- My system usually makes horrid vibration noise whenever the drive is active. This has lead to Pavlovian training which forces me to minimize any large or frequent reads or writes to the drive. I work in fear of the drive.