Time flies... but can flies tell time? In other words, tempus fugit...cogit tempus musca?

This past week I have spent quite a bit of time trying to transition to another PC. I have copied, deleted, installed, re-installed and generally done everything possible to make things happen on a different box of wires in exactly the same way as they did on my (well-worn) box. Despite my experience and knowledge, this operation is never as simple as it should be.

If I were to move offices, I would take my files, and the contents of my credenza and other cubbyholes, place them into boxes, and then move them to the new office. They would be quickly unpacked and stowed, and I'd get on with it.

With the PC change, however, there are several problems that complicate things. 1) You can't just pack things into a box - you can put relevant files on thumb-drives, but you might miss some of them, due to the vagaries of the Windows file-system-collapse-waiting-to-happen that is XP data handling; 2) you may or may not have the installation code for those useful tools you've downloaded along the way, and with the speed withi which freeware and shareware are produced and passed around, the hunt for your tools will take a while; 3) the new box bust be updated and spywared and virus-protected and all that jazz; 4) swollen and inefficient e-mail that nevertheless saves your bacon must be somehow transferred, though for self-confessed pack-rats like me who save sent mail and received mail with attachments, try fitting all that on a shared drive; 5) security structures shift over time, and some of the changes that are made to your PC are invisible to you, yet cause your connections to be hard to re-establish.

I dream of the day when technology really does become a pathway to labor savings. In the quest to dumb-down systems instead of smartening up the users to allow them to use the systems in a better way, we have just complicated the life of the tech worker by a factor of five. Maybe I'm just sour because of how much of my time this has eaten away, but it's painful nonetheless, and is enough to cause me to not want to get the latest and greatest. If makers could somehow develop a truly seamless way to do this, imagine how much more they'd sell. I am not opposed to paying for performance, but if there's a major pain point, then the performance has to be all the more spectacular for me to be willing to buy it.

Note to Gateway, Dell, HP, etc. - If you could deliver true usability and ease of technology flow, you'd have gotten a few thou from me in the past decade, instead of having me buy a $300 e-machine in '99 and making do where I can. And that's just at home...

It's like my cell phone 'rant' earlier in this blog - I don't want features until I get usability, period.

'Til next time...