18. Roundabout
“Defect-free software does not exist.” – Wietse Venema
Thomas Alva Edison is the probably the most famous inventor of all time, mostly known for the electric light bulb. Without it, we’d have to watch TV in the dark. The Wizard of Menlo Park, who started out as a telegraph operator, is also credited with creating the phonograph, stock ticker and camera for motion pictures. The patents he holds in the United States numbers over a thousand. He has some in Germany, France and the United Kingdom. His work covered audio and visual aspects of technology. Without him, world’s fairs and expositions would not have occurred when they did in Chicago, Buffalo and Louisiana. The power station on Pearl Street in Manhattan was his doing. Homes, businesses and factories can thank him for his contributions.
Other innovators contributed for years and still do so. They’re just not as well known. Many came up with great ideas but others swiped them and benefited. This has been taking place for a long time. To see many of the advances, just look around the rooms in your home: kitchen, bedroom, dining room and bedrooms. Doing so, you can see what various inventors have come up with. Some of these gadgets have helped people, while others may have appeared to be innovative but with time they hurt people and polluted the earth. Technology has made a difference but also turned out to be the creator of health hazards.
I promised a few thoughts about workarounds earlier. They’re nothing more than a method of solving an issue because the normal process doesn’t work. Another name for them is a patch, something I encountered decades ago when I worked at the company in White Plains. The big computer was scheduled to run in the evening, but a problem arose. The on-call person either fixed it or contacted someone who did. It was remedied with a patch, which would later involve more analysis and a permanent solution. In some cases, the patch stayed with no other action. This happened too many times because of too much work for the staff while the small stuff was ignored.
Because of the nature of computer systems, each was only around for a few years. This happened because the design wasn’t that great; they were too many bugs and not enough exterminators; companies often bought a Digital Equipment Corporation product in place of an IBM machine. In the place I worked in the mid 1970s, at least one system, order entry, used a five-position field for each date, with the year represented by a single digit: 1976 used the number 6; 1978 was represented by the number 8. Obviously this system had to be changed before the 1980s arrived – more likely by 1979, at least.
A colleague and fellow consultant from the Boston area gave a name to these programs and systems because of their short lives and all the patches. He may also have considered the capability of some of the programmers. His word for the software was trash. To me, that fit perfectly.
This method of moving around the problem is employed time and again today, whether you use a laptop, ERD or desktop. I’ve been getting by with it for years. In early March 2015, I was writing this book and adding something from another document. After doing that my font size changed to size 18 or more so I made a few changes to accommodate it. Things got worse and soon all my paragraph indents were gone. Since I had over a hundred pages written, I knew that fixing that deficiency was out of the question. The workaround came to my rescue as I saved the file with a similar name and copied the new paragraph to a temporary file, which I edited the way I wanted it. I then went back to the original document and copied the temporary file to it. I was lucky that I had modified only a single paragraph. Had I made other changes, the rescue effort would have been more complex.
Parts of this book are added to and changed by my document editor and on that occasion there could have been a major disaster because of the fault of the software. A month before, I made quite a few changes to the book and then the system crashed. All the changes could have been lost. I looked for a saved file that may have helped, but even if I found it, many modifications wouldn’t have been in it. One solution is to do a save every so often. That idea could have made the saving process even worse. Sometimes you can’t win. Blame it on Murphy.
Many years ago a warning was given to beware the ides of March. People don’t listen so I went about my business in the middle of that month in 2015. I edited a document that was becoming my tech book and added a quote at the start of each chapter. It took some effort but I was happy with the result, saving the document as before. The following day I did some more minor changes to two chapters but noticed that a quote was missing from a chapter. Soon I noticed it wasn’t the only quote gone: no chapter had one to start it. I saved the file with a different name, just in case. I figured there could be a backup somewhere but wasn’t counting on it. All my work from the day before seemed lost. Then I saw a file in the writing folder that had a strange name, something like 1, followed by two or three dots and a letter or two. I opened it and the PC blew up – just kidding: I found the missing file. Carefully I managed to have the quotes restored as well as the last two changes of the day. I was fortunate that the file was saved with that strange name. Why, I’ll never know, and won’t spend time trying to figure out.
There was a time when I saw words that indicated that my number crunching document wasn’t saved. However my work was still on my PC as B06319278, or something similar. I could then open it and save it with the previous meaningful name. After some time, this scenario never happened again, but lately it returned. The problem doesn’t happen with other types of files, but tomorrow’s another day. Many times I’ll open a document of this same type, make no changes and when I try to exit, it asks me if I want to save it.
Until a few months ago, I had no problem closing PDF files. That changed in early 2015. The document had an x at the top right corner, but pressing it did nothing. Maybe I just had to wait a while, like twenty minutes. I figured out a way of doing the close by using my web design software, but not everyone has that option. An easier way is using three keys: Cntl, Alt and Delete. I hope they’re on your machine. You can also try a link on a certain other document. I won’t relate this method since closing any file shouldn’t be that complicated.
More often than I’d like, my PC work grinds to a halt and then I see a message box with the words, Please tell xxxxxxxxx about this problem. I have two choices of a response, Send Error Report or Don’t Send. I usually chose the latter option since my PC has an operating system that’s not supported any longer. I did send the error once or twice before for a similar problem and the same situation still pops up. I figure it wasn’t solved and there’s no sense reporting these messages again.
If you need to be convinced of document problems, just consider the spelling and grammar option. At times corrections are made but not in other instances. This is discrimination. The software should do the change thing all the time. That can’t be done because the software isn’t that sophisticated. Really, this editor is too complicated for it to be tested and thus will always have problems. It can be made better with updates, but all the bugs will never be removed, and there are plenty. Many times I see the suggestion to correct a sentence with this phrase, Fragment (consider revising). As an author, what I wrote has more impact than what is suggested. At times the word were is suggested in a sentence in place of was when the latter is the right word and the editor is wrong.
Technology should be sued for discrimination. They have it in for the elderly who can’t figure out some of the way email, web sites and other stuff works. I don’t blame them since much of the stuff appears to have been created on Mars. The mess of tech has also made retirees’ workday longer as they call for help or check web sites that are in need of repair to resolve issues and don’t have enough time to go to zumba classes, the track – think ponies, here, not jogging – or enjoy their golden years. Email enters into the picture, too. Retirees are too stressed out to party. There’s more prejudice against people who never were in a typing class. These people are so behind the trained individuals who can speed type. What about the individuals with fat fingers who can’t maneuver so well on those tiny keys?
Returning to checks on grammar and spelling, it does have a purpose: It’s good for laughs. I worked on a project over a decade ago with Paul Spagnola. When I documented what had been done, I included his name in some documentation. One of the correction possibilities offered by the checker for his surname was spittoon.
The number crunching software is complicated and I only use a small piece of it since it has too many issues. It doesn’t seem long ago that I had difficulty saving a document. Too often people see their document, email or web page disappear. Saying this is frustrating is an understatement in the least. Some times you can recover, but not always, at least not completely. At times I was lucky. Another problem I see quite often on these files is a calculation that shows that the developer cut math class. The answer when 2, 2, and 8 are added should be more than one digit. The sort doesn’t work quite right all the time and many of the formulas yield bogus results.
I saw another strange deficiency when I opened one of these files and the screen kept moving south reaching line 22067 even though it only had sixty-five significant ones. I have no idea what was going on there but I did close the file.
I’ll talk about the comparison between General Motors and Microsoft in chapter 22 but mention solving problems on many devises by doing a simple reset. My PC doesn’t have that button on it, so to achieve that, you have a few options: logoff; pretend to do a logoff and do a restart; turn off the power bar; say a prayer; reformat your hard drive. Instead of that last choice, which I recommend you never do, there’s Colonel Slade’s idea, which I brought up in chapter 12. The idea of fire may be a great idea. Upon hearing thunderous applause after a song, either Bud or Travis of the folk duo, said: No really, where the hell were you last night? We had one crowd that wouldn’t have warmed up to us if we had all been cremated together. As a matter of fact, it might have been a good idea.
The company that produces my ERD has similar editing and number crunching features as my desktop, but I don’t use them often, since they’re very basic and I don’t know either’s potential. My ERD has a reset button. It took me a while to find it. Actually I used it all along since it’s the indented thing at the bottom middle of the device, depending on whether you’re in landscape or portrait mode. Until a short time ago, I wasn’t sure how to switch modes even though I managed doing that by accident. I think I have it straight now. Whether on my ERD or any other computer, the reset button is truly archaic and a copout.
The Search software on my PC doesn’t always work as I have found. That’s the program with the magnifying glass in the second column that you see when you click Start at the left bottom of your screen. The search for words in the editor has a few faults too. Looking for a specific word in either case came up empty even though the word entered was there. Since I’m writing this book using this document processor and taking full advantage of technology as much as possible, any errors you see in the finished product are thanks to tech. There are so many problems with so much technology. Some people may not encounter the same difficulties I do, but that’s related to updates, different versions of the software and the coming together of so much software by different companies. Don’t forget about troublesome viruses, worms and boondoggles. Detecting the cause of some problem is close to impossible.
If anyone asks you if you know the name of the group that recorded “Roundabout” in the early 1970s, say, Yes. You answered two questions right. Yes is the name of the progressive rock band from England. The song in question can be found on their 1971 release, Fragile. Of their twenty studio albums, almost half have reached the top ten in either the United States or the UK. Sales have surpassed thirteen million copies of their music.