Fabulous Feisty Fawn

Posted: April 25th, 2007 | Author: amake | Filed under: Diatribes, Technology | 3 Comments »

Sorry I haven’t been posting here much lately. While things were busted for a bit I started using my mixi diary, and it became a little bit habit-forming. Not that it’s all that amazing technologically, it’s just that my audience in Japan tends to only have internet access on their cell phones, and so have a hard time reading any blogs that aren’t specifically tuned to be viewed on devices with small screens and expensive bandwidth.

I’m going to go HyperNerd™ on you guys for a sec, so bear with me.

When I arrived in Ikata, my office computer was a PII running Win98 on an ISDN line. (Note: For those of you who don’t speak Nerd, that means “bad”.) It was practically unusable.

I bitched to the right person, and sat back while important people were consulted, budgets were calculated, palms were greased, consensus was built, clocks ticked, paint dried, empires rose and fell, etc. In the end, the enchanted accounting fairies granted me one (1) computer, for external use only.

After a month of taking bids from vendors, then waiting for the machine to arrive, it was promptly placed on my desk and immediately ignored. For another month.

Repeatedly sighing (not-so)-under-my-breath, my frustration again reached the ears of my guardian angel, who dragged the IT troll out of his cave up to set up my machine and plug me into the World Wide Cybermation Superspaceway.

I was on my way to productivity when I noticed that he had locked down Windows so tight that I couldn’t actually do my job. He wouldn’t let me install applications, despite the fact that the standard tools of office slavery are completely irrelevant to what I do. I practically had to torture him to get the proxy info so I could test the English website in Firefox.

So what did I do? I promptly slapped Ubuntu Linux on the other partition and mentally flipped the IT troll a nice big bird. As hard as I could.

But all was not happy in the land of Edgy Eft. My computer was too new (imagine that!) for the video drivers to work properly, so Google Earth wouldn’t work. And I couldn’t even see the networked printers, much less print to them. Thus began several long months of dual-booting, switching to Windows every time I had to print.

Until today. Today I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04, née Funky Fink Fresh Fosbury Flapping Fanny Feisty Fawn, and now Google Earth works and I can see the printers and after a bit of finagling the poorly-packaged Canon printer drivers (though your execution sucks, thank you for making Linux drivers), I can now print!

The moral of the story: I win IT.

---