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This NYTimes story really struck a chord with me. It suggests that the geeks of the world are getting sick of providing so much free tech support, and that we are expecting people who enjoy the fruits of computers and the net to also take on the respoinsbility of learning about how things work enough that they behave correctly. Some disagree. I don’t think they get the point.

Yes, yes, you’re all upset that you can’t understand these incomprehensible computers, and it’s not your fault that they are difficult and new, and techies can’t treat you like second-class citizens. In much the same way that we can’t all be lawyers, or doctors, but that doesn’t mean that doctors or lawyers treat the rest of us with disdain because we don’t know how to perform open-heart surgery or get a million dollar settlement.

No, you’re wrong. It’s not that at all.

We expect people who operate cars to know enough about how to do it that they do it correctly. We actually make them take tests! Penalize them for doing things that are hazardous. We don’t expect people to be lawyers, but we expect them to obey laws. We don’t expect them to be doctors, but we expect them to know the basics of healthy living, and when to get their shots, and the like.

We don’t expect everyone to be a computer expert. But we expect that, if they decide they are goint to use a computer, that they take a little bit of time to learn how computers work — read a manual, take a class, buy a book, whatever — and take the necessary steps so that they can safely and conscientiously operate their computers.

I don’t do tech support any more. I get ill every time I hear someone say, “I don’t understand computers!” If you don’t understand them, don’t use them. We’re not forcing you to. And if you want to use them, learn the basics of understanding them. You don’t have to understand how the circuits pass electrical signals. You don’t have to know what a compiler is. But come ON. If you go into the kitchen with no experience, no training, and no recipe book, what you get out of the oven for dinner will more likely then not taste terrible. Is your excuse that you don’t understand how this strange cooking thing works?

With an excuse like that, no one will want to come over to your house for dinner. Same in this case — no one wants you on the internet.

I was feeling pretty bad about switching to a fixed-width design (one where the web page does not expand to fit the entire browser window), but then I found that there is an ongoing debate about just this issue going on right now, with more and more people supporting fixed-width for the design control vs. fluid designs that maximize use of screen real estate. What are the advantages? When you’re designing for fluid it’s much more difficult, and you often can’t do things or line things up without an excessive amount of tinkering and tables nested within tables and all that. And then, to top it off, your nicely formatted paragraphs of text end up expanding to fill the entire screen, looking awful with paragraphs being only one or two lines long, and the reader having to move their eyes all the way across the screen to read it, which is just a very bad situation. There is a reason books and newspaper columns are narrow. And I should know — I write all my papers using L^AT_EX, which uses nicer fonts and much larger margins then Microsoft Word and the like for the express purpose of making things more readable and easier on the eye.

I’m still not sure I really like fixed width in all situations (I often find sites that use it very contraining, and it’s annoying when you have a large monitor and the site was designed for a small one), but I might just be going with it anyway, because I like how it looks for my site. Hmm.

I’m attempting to redesign this site and move it to a new blogging system. This’ll be the fourth design, and I hope to capture in it some of the information that was long in the transition between design 2 and design 3. Somewhere along the way I lost some biographical info, old files, etc. I’m drawing heavy inspiration from Jason Kottke‘s simple, direct site with minimal junk. This site redesign has been on my mind for a while and is kinda a part of the whole “life redesign” I’m going through at this point – simplified, focused, deeper, more real.

This is also the first design I’m doing on a PC, since my Mac is still dead. I’m borrowing cycles from Shaina, who is nice enough not to kick me out of her room. Shaina rocks.

Two annoying things that Kevin points out:

The Wasington Post has an article on how the Bush administration is rewriting history by retroactively changing their web site to reflect policy. Some of the deletions: information on how condoms can be used to stop unwanted pregnancies and avoid sexually transmitted diseases, a report showing that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer, and a transcript from a Nightline interview where the interviewee tows the party line that the US taxpayer will pay no more then $1.7 billion to rebuild Iraq — thanks to contributions from other ally nations, of course.

Second is a BBC piece about how Governer Arnold has declared a “fiscal emergency” in California so that he can redirect money from welfare and public health care programs towards police and firefighting, which are apparently underfunded now that he has removed the controvertial car tax. Now I don’t know about the car tax, but Arnold’s tactics closely mirror what the Bush administration has done with Medicare and other programs — finding ways to “force” them into debt or cutbacks. So you don’t like welfare, fine. Debate it in the open, try to get a law passed. Stabbing programs you don’t like in the back and then claiming that it’s not your fault, that’s just evil.

ARGH!!!

So, I’m attempting to set up the Maintex computers to work better, be more standardized, and be more secure. All of these computers came from Dell with Windows XP Home installed, and the company doesn’t see the financial incentive to upgrade to XP Pro since they aren’t doing anything on a domain, don’t have any Windows servers, etc. This should be fine. XP Home should be fine, right?

So I went through and removed all of the Dell crap, photo album software and jukeboxes and strange support programs and spyware. I also installed all of the Windows updates and patches, the various programs Maintex uses, disabled Internet Explorer scripting and such, removed Outlook Express, installed Mozilla, removed as many references to the terribly insecure Internet Explorer as possible, set up network settings, and the like. All set!

When I go in the C drive and select everything, it says that I have 2.33GB used, but for some reason the hard drive insists that I’m using 4.02 GB, the difference being two more CDs to Ghost the computer. So fine, I get it all Ghosted onto four CDs. Then discover that none of these CDs have floppy drives for a boot disk, and that, despite what the manual says, no, Ghost does not make it’s disks bootable by default.

So I burn another four disks and get Ghosting. Set up a computer in 30 minutes. Go to change the Security ID but see that I can’t do so since XP doesn’t include DOS and my boot disk is, alas, still a floppy disk. If it’s a problem, I’ll figure out how to make a boot CD later, but it doesn’t appear to be causing any problems. XP so far has not tried to “phone home” or deactivate itself, so that’s good, I’ll assume that’s because I left the Dell support partition intact.

Okay, let’s get down to the real problem here. Maintex uses TinyTERM by Century Software to do terminal emulation for it’s SCO server. (Yeah, SCO.) So Term works great when I tested it with the admin account, but apparently it won’t run on a non-admin XP account. The hell? No way am I letting everyone run an admin account. I see a tip on a web page and type control userpasswords2 into the “Run…” dialogue and it pops up a nice hidden Win2K-like user administration panel. I change the default user from a “Restricted” user to a “Standard” user, which should solve the problem.

Except, despite the program in Win XP Home allowing me to make this change, apparently XP Home does not have a “Standard” user, only “Limited” or “Administrator.” So you can do absolutely everything or absolutely nothing. “Standard” users I guess are a “feature” of XP Pro. Grr.

But that’s not all. Now that my user is a part of a non-existant group, the user just completely disappears, and I can’t get it back. Great! And now I’m sitting at a Windows “Welcome” screen with no users to select. Groovy.

I eventually figure out that Ctl-Alt-Del gets me to another login screen where I can login with the apparently hidden real “Administrator” account named, appropriately, “Administrator”. Riiight…

So yeah, the users are going to be running admin accounts. And when one gets a virus, it’s gonna be that much easier for the virus or malicious program to take over the computer completely and wreak havoc on the network.

Not my fault.

Thanks, Microsoft.
Yes, I still hate you.