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So I haven't been very active the past few months... Yeap. That's it. Just a simple observation.

Though if your wondering, the reason is mostly work; 40+ hours a week. Anyway, continue with your lives...

-EGO

For those who don't know (all of you?) I work for my campus IT department as a Technology Consultant, which on most days consist of me sitting around and explain to people how to print, save, and 'interweb'. However there are times when I, along with some of the staff get to do real work, like installing new hardware, software, or system testing. Recently the pointy haired boss upstairs got it in there little pea brain heads to try and install vista around campus. This was to say the least a cluster fuck full of bad ideas.

The first systems they had us work on where the 4 year old dells in the commons. Now these computers being not only four years old, but also being shitty four year old computer didn't like the downgrade. Most just spasmed and failed, while two actually committed suicide, having there North bridge's cook inside the case. The end result of this first snafu was half the computing commons was closed, and a literal hoard of angry patrons had to be fended off with the various office supplies. Not that I can blame them for being angry, it is after all near the end of the semester and many project due dates have come up. After spending a whole nine hours fixing this mess, four of which where overtime for me, the bosses upstairs started to devise their next epic failure.

The next day I come in I get a nice little lecture from my supervisor about how we where going to install vista on some of the newer computers, and we where going to make it work no matter the cost. Well I do have to say we got the OS on the computers, and they even booted up into it. Unfortunately the whole system was literally unusable. Due to the very fucked up privilege system and DRM systems in vista, all the media software on the computers was non functional. Mind you that's all these computers are used for is media editing, and occasionally simulations. Hell, even our regular software wouldn't work right and any thing on the Citrix system was unreachable. So after working for a total of 6 hours trying to get vista to work, we (and by we I mean I at this point in time) pretty much gave up. I believe the computers are still siting in the commons in there useless state.

But that's not the best part, oh no. You see some of the faculty (I.e. professors) are also quite adamant about getting vista installed on the lectern computers in the lecture halls. Well there's one major problem with that, vista is fundamental not compatible with a presentation system using more then one monitor. You see on our lectern there is a monitor, who's input needs to be mirrored to the over head projector. In XP this doesn't pose a problem, you just set the option in the display properties. However in vista this feature is "unsupported", that is to say it's disabled, and there is no way to activate it. I spent all of today (Friday 4/11/08) not so much installing vista on the lecterns but trying to explain to the faculty why they couldn't use both the monitor and projector at the same time.

Anyway long story short, vista effectively turned a hundred grand worth of equipment into a hundred dollars worth of papers weights, and no one except the other TC even knows or cares why. I can't wait till next semester when every thing has to be "upgraded".

*Note this is a work in progress I may edit, clean it up and add to it over the next few days.