Crenshaw And The Overmind (2nd ed.)

Finished off the year wonderfully today. went in to work (for some ungodly reason) and found out that the transaction server had gone down. The green-on-black terminals were singing their one note chorus, and this was the end of the month AND the year blah blah blah. I'm not officially IT, but it's acknowledged that I'm the guy to go to when this stuff happens, but the door to the "data center" (a tiny closet crammed with files and a decrepit old IBM server with SCO unixware) was locked and I didn't have access. So the boss comes in and unlocks the door, and immediately proceeds to call the answer people to reboot the server and help him login. I'm standing off to the side, because --after all-- these are the people who set up the server, and i'm watching the whole thing happen. First, the bootloader prompts if the user would like to backup the last good system image. "What does this mean?" ok, just hit yes. Where do you want to save the file? "God, I don't know this stuff. Wait, there isn't an option to save it to the hard drive." I said "right there, save it to FILE." Do you want to compress the image? on and on he wrangled with this and i'm starting to lose my cool. Finally, he gets past the disk image (having saved it to dat) and proceeds to some primitive looking x login. I watch in disbelief as the other end tells him to enter "su -" at the login prompt, and I couldn't even pipe in with "NO NO NO NO NO" before he was out the door fetching the login info that some dork wrote down two years ago the last time tech support made a service call.

And then he signed in as root. He's got an xp media center in his office, so he thought that fvwm -- the desktop -- was some sort of error (see left). This is a long ramble that basically amounts to nothing other than how dependent on routine computer users have become. They learn one paradigm, imposed on them by microsoft, and are totally intimidated by anything other than good ol' windows.

In other news, I'm starting work on a very exciting project. It's a "carputer" system that will be called either empeg reloaed or Go!box. Go!box will be a hardware and software package, but the software is my area. I have lot of ideas for this project, all of which i will put forth here.
Can you say embedded linux? I CAN.
Most meaningless post ever....