pseydtonne | How to traverse cultures and thereby stay sane

Most of my recent posts have been dull geek stuff with no appeal to most of you. I wrote them out of the "hey, lookee" need to say to myself "here's a thing I did with stuff on hand". This post is going to be longer, deeper and more descriptive of the mindset I've cultivated from my research. It starts with one device that is easy to describe.

I can see the insidious problems wash away. Then double-click a button and stare at a nearly-empty space and figure out how to fill it efficiently. Double back and I see more sections of a world its owner cannot help but pollute; two more taps and I'm back to deciding what pollutions this new world I've built could use.

I bought a KVM switch. This is a dongle about half the size of the palm of my hand. I've plugged in my keyboard, video monitor wire and trackball mouse (the K, V & M of the name) and it splits them to two towers. This doesn't use any software on either computer: instead, it exploits a key almost no modern operating system employs and lets me switch from working on one tower to the other.

You know the ghetto of keys you never touch above the PageUp and Home keys? This switch uses the Scroll Lock button, the middle child of three orphans. I hit Scroll Lock twice quickly and I cross from one computer's problems to another's. It turns out this unused key, couple with a device I'd stalled on buying, has been the key that cranks up my productivity.

This started on Tuesday, when one of my coworkers crept up on my cubicle. "You think you could fix another of my children's computers?"

"I suppose I could," I replied. She smiled so brightly. A few weeks ago she'd handed me what was once some office's random desktop unit and was now her daughter's home machine. It was full of issues. I tried to pull apart its demons, but I decided it would be easier to clear out the mess with a clean hard drive and the list of her license keys for reinstallation. Within six evenings, I'd turned the old box and the smiling coworker into happy campers.

What I love about helping this coworker that I'll get the full story of the computer, its owner and the need each should provide the other. I love storytellers. She loves that I work for cheap and do more than anyone charging twice as much and I always upgrade the RAM.

I didn't expect her to have the new project in her trunk. It was another baby box from maybe two or three years ago. I love that computers are starting to come in stranger shapes and varieties. It means they're being made for regular people.

It blew my mind that this box was short a couple useful tidbits. It also dawned on me that I still needed to fix my burgeoning future jukebox computer. The juke joint didn't need as much interactive labor -- I could set it to a long task involving downloading and installing stuff and check on it occasionally. It didn't even have a need for a mouse yet -- the cursor blinks until I type some weird command that I'll have to change and resubmit.

The idea that what I type there is the deeper guts of what happens in a window-based world is like looking at Kanji and hearing someone read it. Where is the connection between the ideograms and the commands? One time I tried to show Maggie and

stardust653 how to use the command prompt within Windows to make folders and then delete them. Not only couldn't they care, they couldn't see any relationship between what I typed and the stuff that popped into the file window. I wanted to show that you could move files significantly faster and set up rules such as "move any file with a name that has 'p' for the second letter to the floppy drive". It must have looked like I was trying to use the low gears on a car with an automatic transmission.

I wanted to work on both machines at the same time, so I bought the KVM switch. I was impressed immediately. I expected one or the other computer to have a hissy fit. Instead, each got things done while the other had my visual and dextral attention.

I had a problem that needed solving on the juke box -- why wouldn't this one file download when I could see it struggling for it? I was so flustered that I became annoyed with my desire to learn anything about Gentoo Linux if mean this much suffering. I'd try a hypothesis, get an unexpected result, and go back to stewing. That was until I had the switch.

Suddenly, I could switch back to beating up my paid project. I'd get wrapped up in its problems, fascinated by its choice of when to be sluggish. I could then clear my head one the Gentoo problems long enough to let a new idea emerge. Then I'd switch back.

This accelerated solutions. By the time I needed to get to bed, I'd solved my install problem (I added a double quotation mark to the end of a line in a script and thereby ended a days' long loop) and thrown a few hundred demons out of the Windows baby box.

Tonight I got wrapped up in extracting a Trojan horse. I saw how it could fool Windows through a simple alphabetical name shuffle and thereby make progress impossible. I was amazed! I had to write.

I hope I've explained why I get so hung up on my projects. I get a lot from them. As i untangle things, I learn about the world. I learn how to be useful. I decant the knowledge of many worlds in hopes that I can explain the port wine of knowledge to you.

You'll have to excuse me now -- I have to switch worlds again.

-speaking in tongues, Dante