Techno-RANT!

WARNING: This blog-entry has displaced another blog-entry I’d planned to write. However, for the sake of the breakables around me during times of frustration such as this, it’s better I get the anger out of my system this way for now.

I am so alarmingly tired of the “technology experts” at my school.

Currently, once I press the power button to my work computer, it takes about an hour and fifteen minutes before it becomes as close to reasonable to use as it’s going to get. Sadly, that's NOT even an exaggeration. On the bright side, I’ve been promised a replacement computer. (But then again, I remember getting promised a pony when I was a kid.)

So, essentially, I cannot work effectively at school. But at least I have the equipment to work at home! All I need to do is access a program called Citrix and I can access what’s called my “H-Drive” at school (wasn’t there a bomb similarly named?). This H-Drive is where I diligently back-up my work every day in case my laptop dies (which it doesn’t have the decency to do; since laptop-death is pretty much the only way to get a replacement faster).

Oops, sorry Steve. The brilliant folks in IT (which I think is just the last two letters of their full acronym) have “upgraded” our access channels. NOW, the Citrix I used to use won’t allow me access to my H-Drive. In fact, now it only lets me use the school software from off-campus… of course, that means that I have to carry that stuff with me if I want to work on it away from school. See? That’s called “convenience” at my school!

So then, how do I access my H-Drive from home? The brilliant folks in IT have provided us a handy link on the web to a program called Netstorage. This program allows us to SEE what’s on our H-Drive, but that’s about it. The interface allows you to THINK that you can do stuff, but, like pressing the elevator key multiple times in succession, or, like moving the temperature dial up or down in a classroom, nothing really useful results.

All I can seem to download are files containing “links” to the information I want, except that the links do not really work. Of course, there is a trick where you can select multiple files to download, which then are packaged into a “zip-file” that is downloaded. This is particularly neat for Vista users who may run into trouble with zip-files, but ultimately there is little actual risk since the zip-file that is downloaded contains nothing anyway.

Before signing off, let me grudgingly apologize to the GOOD folks in the IT department who are subjected to the wrath of irate users (and abusers) when the decisions to make such brilliant changes to the system are out of their actual control. They do the best they can with what they have to work with (and in spite of their brilliant leaders who make such brilliant decisions).

Finally, although I hope it is redundant of me, I guess I should explain that when I used the word “brilliant” up above, I was using it in the same way I’d describe the thinking behind installing screen-doors on submarines. THAT kind of “brilliant”.