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Its happened again…

And, as usual, there’s a (possibly too long) story to introduce it.

As an IT professional one of my standard jokes (either to myself or with others) is that if I could just have back all that time I spent waiting for Windows to re-boot. Install a driver, re-boot, test, still doesn’t work, edit the ‘ini’ file, re-boot, test.. good that works.. install virus scanner, ‘Please re-boot your system to complete the installation’… you get the idea.

The only thing I may have spent longer doing, professionally, is installing operating systems; DOS 6 a floppy to boot (the entire OS was 6 floppies), Win98 a floppy boot and a CD install and by Windows 2000 (Win2K) it was 4 floppies to boot and then a CD to install. I probably lost count of the number of Win2K installs I’d done by sometime in 2002… And my favourites (not…) were old pieces of hardware where I actually had to create the four boot floppies manually and go from there…

Whilst I was thinking about this something on the TV caught my eye. Because my ‘VCR’ is digital (a PVR), it is kind of constantly recording so I rewind back to the beginning of the segment, press ‘record’, and watch it. It was a lovely little 5 minute story about Dolphins in Israel presented by SBS‘s Global Village programme. Once it had finished I copied the MP2 stream over to my PC via USB, ‘loaded it’ up, trimmed off unwanted material front and back, and saved it as a Divx AVI. I then uploaded the file to my FTP server and sent my friend in the UK an email to say ‘check this out, I thought it was a nice story’…

It’s a crazy situation, whilst I’m on digital television (DTV) and recorders, that Australia’s DTV is crippled by the complete absence of a useful Electronic Programme Guide (EPG). This is due to some bizarre claim station owner’s make, citing copyright, about the ownership of their television guides. If you wish to pay, yes pay, you can download the next weeks tv programmes to your PC and by installing appropriate software on the PC and your digital recorder get up to date information (or an EPG) onto your digital recorder (and trust me, one without an EPG is pretty well useless). The UK, in contrast, transmits all DTV EPG data for 2 weeks in advance free to air…

Anyway, I have this computer in bits on my lounge room floor and it needs to be ‘blatted’ – a highly technical term of mine meaning it needs a completely fresh install of an operating system. It’s a bit ancient (yep it’s a couple of years old) so it’s going to need Windows 2000 and I start to have unpleasant feelings about having to make 4 boot floppies (let alone actually finding four floppies) off the MSDN Win2K install CDROM (which is not bootable). ‘Stop!’ I say to myself, as I plonk down at my PC, ‘there has to be an easier way’. Google: ‘Win2K install boot CDROM’. Now, what Bart doesn’t know about Windows boot disks isn’t worth knowing – and in exactly 2 minutes I have a recipe for creating a self booting, Win2K (with service pack 4 already rolled-in) installation CD using Bart’s tools and the files off my original Win2K install CD. And about half an hour later a completely re-built PC (and ‘look mom, no floppies’).

None of these vignettes is much more than my ramblings of the day, however, none of them would be possible without the Internet.

Another observation is that all this ‘stuff’ (technology) has to ‘come together’ with the Internet. I know the media ‘rabbits on’ about technology convergence, and I have been reading about it (and the paper-less office…) for about 20 years, but it ain’t happening. For example, take paragragh 5 of this little story – I tally 8 acronyms and would guess that I know about 3 people personally who could actually read the paragraph and have the faintest idea what I’m talking about! That isn’t convergence.. hmm.. maybe that’s a blog topic for another day…