Day: July 31, 2007

Yesterday I invited some friends over for dinner. I figured I needed some company with Howard gone for one more night. Much to my surprise, Howard walked in the door before we were even done eating. He left San Diego on Sunday instead of on Monday. I talked to him several times and he misled me about where on the road he was. I was, and am, very glad to have him here. I rushed to him and hugged him. I’m pleased to say that I focused on his face first before my eyes were drawn inevitably to The Boots. He got new boots in Vegas. Every time he walks into the room with them, my eyes are drawn to them. They are so wonderfully incongruous with the rest of his attire. (Pictures here)

Despite my earlier grumpy whining, I am really happy today. Howard is at home. Every time he walks into the room I am glad he is here. I’ve found myself sitting in his office, not because I had anything to say, but because I wanted to be near him.

A portion of our pre-con stress was trying to make sure that the booth was set up with Point of Sale credit card processing. Purchases were made, configurations were done, but the person who did all the set up work was not at the convention to run it. None of it got used because the people on-site were unable to figure out how to make it all work. Howard hauled it all home. Now my assignment is to make it all work and train Howard on it so that we don’t have this problem again.

I booted up the laptop and plugged in all the gear includine a barcode reader and a credite card reader. It all worked beautifully. I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t make it work at the convention. The next step was to connect the machine to the internet so I can do live processing. I made a trip to a store to buy the necessary ethernet cable. Then I came home and plugged the machine in. No can do. The computer will not recognize the existence of a network connection.

Okay.

So I decided that we’d pull out the laptop that Howard has laying around. We could use that instead. A mere 20 minutes of tinkering got that one connected to the internet. Now I just had to move the software over. Except that Howard’s machine is running windows 98. It doesn’t have drivers to run the USB stick that I tried to use. It doesn’t even know what to do with a downloaded file with the extension .zip. So I have a machine that runs all the software beautifully, but which can’t connect to the internet. I have a second machine which connects just fine, but I’m unable to get software onto.

At this point some of you tech folk are probably brimming with options and suggestions. Many of them would be useful and help me sort out this problem. But the key here is: I don’t want to deal with this problem. Troubleshooting hardware and software is not something I enjoy. It is not something I am good at. I’ve spent ALL DAY and I haven’t even begun the critical task which is processing credit card transactions that took place two days ago. Give me an accounting problem please, not this mess of old hardware and software. I can figure out hardware and software, but I believe that those things should just work without me having to think about them. Yet another reason that I’ll be buying a Mac if I ever have enough money to buy myself a laptop.

I have no clue how to fix the computer which claims the network cable is unplugged when the cable is clearly attached. But I think that I can solve the issues with the other machine by upgrading it to windows xp. Unfortunately I have get a copy which will either cost time or money. Then I have to install it. Then I have to install the point of sale programs. And then finally I will be able to actually do what needs to be done. Maybe. If it all works right.

Until I can get it done it looms. Looming things are stress provoking.