The kids reacted very annoyed, but very polite. The boy threw his still tiny arms a bit
helplessly up and down, gesturing in the air like a little butterfly and responded:
“So sorry Sir! You were never in here, so we thought we could use it.”
Maurice, musing on this, finally realised they must be right and thus might as well stay there and continue to play and told them so. He had woken up On their pleased thanks
and now, in the deepest recesses of his mind, he could still feel them playing.
To his contentment, he found Hilde already seated in her office, as if waiting for him.
“Hi Maurice,” she said happily. What marvellous computer stories would he tell her
now? If only their users would let them... Maurice was positively glowing! He must
have such a good one today. Maybe several. Hilde had slept well too, dreaming of
being in her garden, gardening and collecting herbs for some super recipe she’d
devised.
“Hilde, yesterday evening I surfed, and I discovered a lot of goodies. I wanted to show
you. By the way do you know Mrko Mrnsk broke his arm?”
“No, how?”
“He was surfing on Internet, and then he flew into a jump page, which was advertising about how to configure a Microsoft server so that it worked well. That frightened him
so much that he fell off his surfboard and crashed on the taskbar.”
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Hilde laughed. Maurice had a lot of humour.
Hilde finds everything Maurice does or says fantastic, even his sometimes
dubious humour. But Maurice, oblivious to my remark, continued on his trend:
“In fact I don’t know how he broke his arm, but I saw him passing by in the Watson & Crick building, with his arm in a plaster.”
“At least he will be able type with one hand only then. That will slow him down
developing nonsense for the House.”
Maurice grinned broadly: “You’re right. It’s like Holger, you know the guy, he got a
bump on the back of his head because he opened a new window on internet and there
was a women with brains on it. He got such a fright that he lost balance and fell down
on the floor. This guy has no balls.” Maurice just loved to say such things about other
men.
He opened ‘My Computer’ and found the drive where he kept all sorts of useful little
software for himself and his team. How he loved to feed it in order to help MOU XII
and his colleagues! It was Freeware, mostly, though of course Maurice could have cracked all the codes.
Would they be able to have some peace? Oh how they both hoped to remain
undisturbed doing it. But of course someone did interrupt. But it wasn’t a user. It was a little boy. Maurice first thought it was Sven’s son, and said so to Hilde, but she realised he was not. And even if he was cute enough to advertise, she so wished that Maurice
could go on with his story. Maurice too seemed perplex:
“What’s your name,” he asked the boy with a friendly but solemn face.
“Mikki.”
Maurice turned to Hilde: “Sven’s son?”
Mikki shook his head: “No me it’s Mikki with 2K.”
“2K? Really? Mikki. Listen. We have work to do, will you help us?”
Mikki nodded solemnly.
“We would need some quiet. Could you go and keep guard at the door for us?”
Mikki nodded again and went to the door, which he half closed behind him. And there
he stood, half hidden by the pane. One could almost see him carrying a little shield,
like the McAfee Anti Virus Shield.
Any user who would call now would immediately be put into quarantine.
Hilde giggled and felt a bit guilty. Maurice grinned with sympathy and turned to Hilde:
“Now! Look! This will be great for our users!”
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They cuddled together like two children in a tree house, finally allowed to play.
Digital Sender
“You know our digital sender?”
Hilde nodded: “Of course; but explain it again to our users.”
“The digital sender is a wonder machine, a mixture between Scanner, Fax and
Photocopy machine. Imagine you do not possess a document in PC format, but only
have a printed version of it, but you want to sent it to some colleagues. You just put the stack of papers onto the Digital Sender, and he will convert it to a readable PDF format and send it to yourself by Email. You can than forward it!”
Acrobat PDF
“Yes but with the Digital Sender the PDF the ‘Portable Document Format’ will be in
‘poor’ format, not ‘rich’. You can’t copy or paste from a PDF in poor format. I mean, if the PDF document is of a rich format, you can copy the text from it by simply selecting
it, and then paste it into Word. You just have to remember that you have to click on the in the Acrobat toolbar to enable the ‘Select Text’’ function. If you can select
something that means the PDF is in rich format. You can then copy the selection and
paste in into Word to work on it. But if you cannot select anything, this means the PDF
is in ‘poor’ format, and this is the case of documents produced by the Digital Sender.
Anyway, we don’t even have the licence for the Acrobat Writer, it’s much to expensive
to give to everyone.”
But Maurice smiled mysteriously, promising much:
Optical Character Recognition
“You’re right, but remember about ABBY, the Fine Reader, whom I told you about on
page 195? ”
Hilde nodded with emphasis:
“Abby can convert PDF documents into word, images and text, all of it. It’s called
OCR for Optical Character Recognition”
“Explain again.”
“Remember that trainee, Angela Recluta?”
Hilde nodded with some relief, this trainee had left a few weeks before.
“The perfect trainee. She had of course managed to loose her final report. She hadn’t
put it on her network place, had overwritten it on her hard disk, lost the diskette where she had saved it on too. But she still had the last printed version of it. I passed the stack
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of papers through the digital sender, saved the attached Email on my hard disk, and
then had Abby read it and convert into Word. Pictures and text and all.”
“That’s magic! Wow, this will save other lives too!”
She felt so reassured. Maurice was so reassuring, always having a solution for
everything.
“Ready for the next move?”
Hilde smiled and nodded pleasantly. What story would tell her now?
Image editors
“As you know Mrko Mrnsk has only given us a very drab little software to view the
pictures we like, holidays, travels and so. Plain ‘Paint’ in Accessories only. But this not adequate in what regards work. No way to adapt a pic with what we have, no way to
resize even. Ok we might have the very excellent Paint Shop Pro, but that’s much to
expensive to give to everyone too.”
“So Ok I found a very nice Freeware, that means absolutely free, for our users to use.”
“Tell me now.”
“IRFANVIEW, at http://www.irfanview.com/ . It lets you View, Convert and Resize Images, and it’s free.”
“Resizing is great. Very often you get the picture in a just enormous format, sort of
unusable.”
“Yes, with IrfanView you just open the picture and then choose ‘Image - Resize’
and then reduce the size. You can choose the standard
dimensions, like 640 x 460 pixels, or 800 x 600 pixels. If you
use Wight and Height to adapt the size don’t forget to click on
‘Set new size as percentage of the original’. Otherwise you
won’t keep the right proportions and the picture might be
distorted.”
Hilde was happy, she sure would give this Irfanview to her
users.
“Anyway you have a lot of options. Look here we have Arthur rotated, flipped and
resized.”
“Ah it’s Arthur! I too always think he looked like the little Prince.”
“It’s because he disappeared on another planet.”
He flipped the image again.
Hilde felt like flipping horizontally too. This was great for her users! That’s the way IT
people like it. Picturesque.
“And if you use the command ‘File - Save as’ you can also convert it to the most
common picture formats, like *.gif or better *.jpg.
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“Where did you find the Little Prince?”
“On http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/mp/. It’s multilingual.”
“How Cute. How did you snap just his head?”
“I used MWSNAP, also Freeware, to be found on
Just great. MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows
program for snapping (capturing) images from selected
parts of the screen. Current version is capable of capturing
the whole desktop, a highlighted window, an active menu,
or a fixed or free rectangular part of the screen. You click
on the options below, then click ‘Snap any area’ and
define the area you want to snap. Then you copy it from
MWSnap and paste it into Word for instance.”
“Seems great, yes.” Hilde, as often, felt that Maurice was
an utterly generous man. At this moment she would
gladly have snapped him to.
“Gwendoline can make her manuals with that. She can
capture portions of the screen and paste the images in her
manual.”
I Myself agree with Maurice, I used MWSnap all over in this ‘manual’, it’s a
marvellous useful helpful little thing.
Audio editors
Maurice nodded:
“But wait, I have even better, for recording music and conversations and all. Like
MUSICMATCH, but that’s Shareware. Means you pay a bit. It is an digital-music
management tool that rips, mixes, burns, organizes, plays music, and lets you Super
Tag album and artist information to your MP3s. You can find it on:
http://www.musicmatch.com/. “But that’s not for our users maybe. You know that they prefer to work and would feel guilty if they were playing around.”
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“Oh but users should play around as much as they want. One learns a lot by playing.
Look at children. Why should this stop once we ‘grow up’? I found Shareware for this
too. TOTALRECORDER on HighCriteria. For instance I can record music on the Internet
with it, and then save it as a MP3 format. Of course I’m not allowed too...”
“Don’t cry. The musical companies are loaded with money.”
“And what do you use to listen to all this Music?”
“I just use the WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER, it’s quite ok. It comes free with Windows
anyway. But I know many people like to use WINAMP. Winamp lets you listen to the
biggest choice of formats I believe.”
Burn a CD
“And how to you assemble all this music then?”
“I use NERO, to burn a CD. Nero writes data to CD-R and CD-RW discs. Readable or re-writeable. You can make data CDs and Audio CDs with it, or simply copy a CD.
You can find it on http://www.ahead.de/en/index.html.”
Of course Hilde knew all this too, but it was just to hear Maurice talk, he was singing
again now, something which sounded like Travis, ‘Follow the Light’. She was almost
right, it was Travis, but ‘Flowers in the Window’ Maurice now clicked on. Maurice
smelled of those French candies again, ‘Violettes’ and he presented her with one.
Download sites
“Where do you like to get your
software from?”
“I download it from Tucows, on
Hilde liked that too, but of course
there were more download sites like:
Winplanet at
ZDnet at http://www.zdnet.com/
C|net at
and http://www.emule-project.net/
“Go to a site, surf, find what you like
choose to Download
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choose to save it in a folder you’ve made for that intent
open the folder
and double-click on it to install itt.
“Great. Let’s see what more we can find, and download some more.”
They cuddled together closer and surfed on the download sites to find what was new
there. She found him so good-looking and had he been an ugly little dwarf she couldn’t
have cared less. Though if she thought it over, she suddenly felt sure dwarfs were not
ugly at all. Why ever she had changed her mind about that lately, she couldn’t say.
Maurice smiled:
“On Tucows and its consorts you can find everything you want, even true love, if you
only look for it well. But anyway, Tucows might have been gone the moment I’ll leave
this office.” His eyes took a mysterious look now: “But wait until I show you what I
found for us. The previous was just to be soft on our users. Now I’ll show you what we
ourselves can bring into play. I’ll make you see stars!”
And he carried on enumerating myriads of newly discovered software for her.
IP tools, Wireless Networking, Trace Route Utilities, Modem Sharing, LAN
Messengers, Time synchronizers, User management tools & and many others.
Hilde’s mind prickled with pleasure. His words make her skin prickle. Ambiences like
in Winamp or Media Player; water, windmill, ocean mist, fire storm, brightspere, dance
of circles, cottonstar, drinkdeap, eletriarnation, event horizon, illuminator,
kaleidovision, lotus and ‘I see the truth’ ran all through her body. They stepped into the Word Wide Net, forgetting everything else. Peer to peer they clicked, scrolled,
browsed, surfed, searched, found paused, chatted, touched, fingered, traced, pinged, it
was a wonderful excursion. Hilde literally saw pixels. A pixel is the basic unit of programmable colour on a computer display or in a computer image, and she saw 16
millions of them, each in a different colour. All those agile applets had found the way
to her sixth sense. She had always felt magically attracted by the IT world, now she
was automagically caught in its web. And she cared about every single technical detail
of the execution. That’s the way we computer people do it. Not that drab, messy
missionary stuff common mortals practice. No this was highly exciting, pure www, in
billions of positions.
The phone finally rang. Nine-thirty and they hadn’t been disturbed once. It was a
miracle.
“The little boy did his job well,” said Maurice. ”I shall go and thank him.”
He went to the door and opened it wide, but Mikki was gone.
Maurice stood there a bit stupidly, his box of ‘ Violettes’ in his hand. He felt a bit guilty, sort of exploiting a child like that, and then not. Had he not let him play in his own secret garden? Him and his little girl friend? And he could still sense them there,
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they had not gone.
It was Jakinda on the phone, with her routine question:
“Hilde, ma Belle, I keep forgetting this, but you remember that when I write a new
email and click on the ‘To’ field to open the Address Book with my personal contacts I
never see it.”
“Find your Address Book in the mail folders, right-click on it, choose Properties, then
Outlook Address Book and then ‘Show this folder as an Email address book’,” said
Hilde rather amused, “But the next time you forget this you must dance three times
around the desk.”
The trouble was that the settings of this function were placed on the PC, not the Server, and thus when the user changed PC, because he had changed to another workgroup and
thus office, he had to repeat the manoeuvre. And Jakinda had certainly phoned her for
that question over twenty times…
“It’s not your fault anyway Dear,” said Hilde. “It’s the Chaos.”
Then a trainee appeared in Hilde’s office and demanded that Hilde install her
CorelDraw, Acrobat Writer and Paint Shop Pro 8 for her, at home she had used it too,
and if she didn’t, it would have a terrible impact on a very vital report she was writing and on Science itself. When Hilde had refused, saying it was not in the standard
configuration and much too expensive to give to everyone, she had literally refused to
leave her office, until Hilde followed her to her own, doing what she said. Hilde had to have her removed by Maurice and Sven. But the girl had a point, if one thought of the
fun Hilde and Maurice had had this morning.
A second trainee followed complaining that she couldn’t listen to music on her PC:
“But I can’t even listen to the little music samples of the songs on Amazon! Every PC
has music!”
“It’s because many of this streaming video or audio uses RealPlayer. The House has
closed a certain number of ports, and RealPlayer typically uses port 80.”
The girl didn’t thank her for the information. However, again she had a point. Why
indeed should every PC in the world have music, except the PC’s at the House?
Hilde sighed; maybe her early morning meeting with Maurice would simply stay
wishful thinking.
It’s lunchtime
However they both met for lunch again, vividly discussing grid computing.
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A Bowl of Milk
Keira was completely disorientated. Had all of this really happened? She felt she would
never be sure. The report. With a deadline suddenly put to the next morning. Her
despair. Allan’s despair. Then the happy outcome with a but.
Was she getting nuts too? What a strange dream. So strangely real. Almost an
hallucination. Or vision. There were stories going around the House about other people
having them too. But she had seen one. Worse. She had seen two of them. Well or
dreamt them very clearly. And she’d not been drunk, au contraire, she had not eaten anything since yesterday morning, and not drunk since yesterday evening, not even
water? Though this too could lead to hallucinations, like for those who see a mirage in
the desert.
There had been two of them. At the far end of her office, in the corner. A male and a
female. How could she call the female version?
Was there a word for it? Or had they not realised that she had been watching them?
Maybe seeing such beings was not a psychological sickness, but a rare gift. Keira was
Irish and thus had some experience with kobolds, trolls, dwarfs and leprechauns.
Education is very useful but maybe it made one see things which were not there. And
why was Allan not here too, she missed his warm if shy presence. His cute sensitive
little nose, lively brown eyes, quick movements.
But worse than the thought she might be going mad was the possibility that that what
she was seeing could be the true. And two of them! No, this wasn’t the worst. What
made her frozen with fright was the thought of her report (about ‘Natural against
conventional Healing’) not even being half way through. Over 200 pages remained to
do, to puzzle together using Kaleidoscope and Elements 112. And then she had heard
herself whisper, a very loud whisper: HELP ME. She didn’t really know if she was
referring to the report or to her sanity. Both were obviously at stake.
At the HELP ME the two instantly stopped whatever they’d been doing, stood up,
looked at her, then at each other, as if only just noticing her, whispered to each other for a short while, turned back to her, whispered at each other again. And then she saw
the male putting his tiny hand into his pocket, take out an object, lift it to his mouth and blow into it sharply. It was a whistle.
Keira woke up, with the first ray of sun tinkling her nose. Everything was silent. The
offices around her too, it was still too early. What a strange dream to have had, she
thought. At one time, she must have collapsed on her desk and fallen asleep; her face
still streaked with tears, and dreamt this strange scene. She took a few sips from a
bottle of milk, but there was not much left, strange, hadn’t she just bought a new bottle
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yesterday? For Gima, Allan’s cat. It was highly irregular, but sometimes Allan brought
Gima into the office, and asked her to look after her. Keira didn’t mind, she adored that cat, and the cat adored her. That’s why she was careful to always have a bowl of milk
ready for her. She had apparently drunk the rest of it. She must remember to buy a new
one. At this thought, Keira fell asleep again. Head over her crossed hands.
Thus she was found by Allan, her CLA, one hour later, at six o’clock in the morning.
He came back, hear tousled, unwashed, in the same suit he had been wearing before,
guilty with the three hours of sleep stolen at the side of his cat and leaving Keira alone with her impossible task.
Allan shook her slightly by the left shoulder, and she startled up.
The dream was still vivid in her head. Little figures dancing before her eyes, smiling,
lost in some strange activity. She couldn’t remember exactly what it was.
One little figure was writing strange cabbalistic signs on the computer, like one of
those programmes Nico wrote, but more complicated, two others were typing with the
speed of at least 500 words in the minute, well Hilde typed quite fast, but not that fast, and a fourth one was printing? Ok one of the little figures had looked like Maurice, but then Maurice was very tall. Why did she think of Maurice then? Yes the little Maurice
had had a slight limp; she felt sure of that.
She felt numb and done, incapable of any further action, like in a wake coma.
Alan shook her at the shoulders again:
“My God Keira! Are you all right?”
He didn’t even ask about the report, he knew it was an impossible question, with only
the answer that they would get into some trouble. Of course trouble here did not mean
the same as it would have in another other place. Here one kept it.
Keira did not answer either, just looked at him, as if he wasn’t real either. She rubbed her eyes to force herself to wake up.
Both looked down. And by looking down they looked at Keira’s desk, and by looking
at Keira’s desk they saw the report.
Keira did not remember to have it printed out, not even the few parts of it which she
might have managed to get done.
Alan took the report up and leafed through it. He thought vaguely about what to tell the Scientists. The report was to be translated into the seven main languages of the House
in three hours to come.
But the phone rang.
Keira took it distractedly, out of her obedient habit.
“The translations are done,” announced Bettina, the head of Translators. But she did
not sound proud, but rather bewildered.
“What translations?” asked Keira.
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