Top Ten Reasons Captain Kirk is Still Better Than Captain Picard

10. Kirk jostles better when the Enterprise is hit.

9. Kirk doesn't have some kind of foofy accent.

8. Kirk rips his shirt at the drop of a hat. Picard keeps pulling his shirt down, as it keeps riding up, and that really bothers him. (What is he hiding?)

7. Kirk : Screw the Prime Directive, let's kill something!

6. Picard delegates the landing parties to his first officer; Kirk insists on doing it himself.

5. Picard delegates the overacting to his first officer; Kirk insists on doing it himself.

4. Kirk drinks coffee ; Picard drinks tea. 'Nuff said.

3. Kirk makes sure to show all the alien babes the "Captain's Log".

2. Kirk: Red-blooded American. Picard: French? British? We're not really sure, but it's definitely suspicious.

1. Kirk: not afraid to wear a rug.

My Living Will

Boy, if there's anything we should learn from the Terri Schiavo case, it's that we should all make living wills. Believe me, I've learned my lesson, and I decided that the best way to make sure that my living will is honored is to post it on the web. (That way, there won't be any doubt as to its authenticity.) So here goes:

LIVING WILL
I, Patrick M Brennan, being of sound mind and body, do affirm and declare that this is my LIVING WILL, and reflects my decisions regarding my care in the event of a medical condition which renders me incapable of making informed decisions for myself. I make this declaration of my own free will, without any force or coercion whatsoever.

IF, in the judgment of my physician, I am suffering from an irreversible condition so that I cannot care for myself or make decisions for myself and am expected to die without life-sustaining treatment provided in accordance with prevailing standards of care:

(a) I would very much like my breathing yet mindless body, the bag of reflexes which I have become, to be reduced to being a political football, to be kicked around the media by the likes of Tom DeLay and Randall Terry in the pursuit of a cheap political stunt which ensures them a few days' worth of headlines;

(b) I definitely do not want my spouse to be making any decisions for me whatsoever; I think that's best left to my parents. After all, once upon a time, when I was capable of exercising my own free will, I chose of that selfsame free will to spend the rest of my life with my spouse, and I have only spent years sharing my home and my bed with her. Therefore, clearly, not only do I share none of my religious, moral, and ethical values with my spouse, but she also knows nothing about my religious, moral, and ethical values. My parents, on the other hand, who visited our home on holidays and weekends, and with whom we occasionally have spoken on the phone, know all about my values, which is why they wish to impose their values on my decision regarding how I control the end of my life. Therefore, they should have the final say, not my spouse.

(c) Speaking of my spouse, if I were somehow capable of receiving and integrating outside stimuli and understanding what was going on around me, it would please me immensely to watch on live television as my spouse's name is repeatedly dragged through the mud in the House of Representatives by crass and opportunistic politicians, simply for attempting to fulfill what she perceives to be my wishes and my best interest.

(d) I'd also like someone to explain to my spouse exactly what she's doing wrong. Apparently, she didn't realize that when the Republican Party claims to be the party of getting government off the backs of the people, they weren't talking about gravely personal decisions within a family. When it's an industrial plant, owned by Republican donors, belching tons of toxic filth into the air and water, that's a private matter, and the government should get off those donors' backs. When it's my family, struggling to come to terms with my basic wishes regarding the end of my life, that's where government belongs.

(e) And I'd really love it if somebody could make sure that there are boatloads of creepy anti-abortion protesters hanging around outside my hospital room, especially if they could harass my spouse as she is coming to visit me. That's because it's not bad enough that she's dealing with my illness and impending death -- she should be hounded by crazy fundies with their own agenda who claim to be "pro-life" but who literally couldn't care whether I live or die.

(f) I'd be particularly pleased if the astronomical costs of my care placed a horrible burden of debt on my spouse, and if, thanks to the very same Republicans in the Congress, she would be utterly denied the ability to get out from under it. It would make my afterlife a real joy to know that she would lose our house, our savings, and all our property, literally everything we have worked together to build; and she would be reduced to a life of poverty, working only to pay off what she could of her debt burden, and that without our savings, our daughter would be deprived of any chance to ever receive a decent education, and therefore a way back into the middle class, which is where we were before I had my accident.

(g) Speaking of costs, I wouldn't want any of the burden of my illness to fall on the government. That's why I support the Texas law that George W. Bush signed when he was governor, allowing hospitals to overrule even the decisions of the family, and finally remove my feeding tube once there isn't any more money left to pay for my care. You see, once my spouse is finally bled dry by the costs of maintaining my breathing, bedsore-ridden carcass in a state of living death, I know that the Republican-dominated Congress, which just gutted Medicare and Medicaid, has ensured that there will be no money left; and given the choice between honoring their commitment to "life" and their commitment to tax cuts for their corporate friends, well, you know -- the TV cameras won't be running forever. Once they've been turned off, so will my life support. Finally.

(h) And of course, nothing would please me more than to have the whole sad saga of my family's suffering splayed across FOX News and talk radio as some cheap maudlin moralistic circus, as a feeding frenzy for the kind of bottom-feeding media types who need my story to sell advertising, and who will be on to the next soap opera in another couple of weeks.

Signed on the 23rd day of March, 2005, by my hand and seal:

/s/
Patrick M Brennan

Bits in Boston and New York

What's the fastest, safest, cleanest, most efficient way to travel ever invented? And is it a good idea to buy one? That's the question Claude and Shannon are asking themselves, in my new ten-minute comedy Bits, which is having a performance in New York this April and a short run in Boston this May!

In New York, I'm very pleased to be returning to the American Globe Theater's 11th 15-Minute Play Festival, running April 18th-30th. (For information or ticket reservations call American Globe Theatre at 212-869-9809, or go to Theater Mania. Call early, they're always sold out!) I was at this festival two years ago, and it's one of the best venues I've ever played in. I'm pleased to note that Stacie Scaduto and Don Downie, the same actors who took Bits up in its last performance in New York, are performing at the American Globe.

In Boston, this will be my first time being part of the Devanaughn Theater's Dragonfly Festival, running May 5-22nd. (Go to Theater Mania for tickets.)

Each venue has a different cast and director, so I am particularly excited to see what different groups of people are able to find in this script. Besides that, these two festivals are absolutely worth the price of admission ($15 in both cases, I think).

The Basic Idea of Marriage Is to Raise Kids

The basic idea of marriage is to raise kids. So says Fox News's John Gibson, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. He's got it exactly right. Marriage is for raising kids. That's why we don't allow anyone who is infertile to get married, birth control and single parenthood are illegal, you have to prove you're not married before getting a vasectomy or a hysterectomy, and divorce is compulsory once your children have grown up (and strictly prohibited beforehand).

Can you believe this moron got paid to write this column?

How the hell can I get a job like that?

No, No, Dice!

Dice persists in posting bad code on their online ads!



Since their last ad, they've definitely improved, but good syntax doesn't mean their logic has gotten any better.

The ad still says, in plain English: "If you're salary isn't good, go to Dice.com. If your salary is good, suck it up."

What?

I thought "Suck it up" meant something like "endure pain bravely", or "be strong".

Maybe somebody knows an interpretation of "suck it up" that I'm not aware of. Maybe it means "good for you!" or "way to go!", or "guess you don't need Dice.com!"

I have a suggestion for their advertising folks:

if ((You.workFor("Dice.com") || You.haveAdClient("Dice.com"))&&(You.writeAdCopy()))
{
   You.stopTryingToWriteCode(please);
}

Why Graffiti 2 Sucks

I have had a CLIE NX-80V for a few weeks now, ever since my last CLIE died on me. (It turned out it was only playing dead -- but it didn't rise from the grave until after I had the new machine in my hand.) Even though I knew that the NX-80V was an excellent machine in nearly all respects, I had resisted upgrading for a couple of years anyway, since I knew the NX-80V used Graffiti 2, and I feared that Graffiti 2 would be a disaster. My initial fears have proven sadly true. Graffiti 2 sucks. I tried really hard to adjust, to unlearn eight years of Graffiti and relearn the new system, and although it doesn't suck as badly as I thought at first, it's still bad enough that I had to finally find an alternative.

I've been using Graffiti ever since 1997, and it only took me a couple of weeks to reach a plateau of proficiency at which it was really useful. For short pieces of information, i.e. phone numbers or email addresses, it was excellent; and in settings such as classes or business meetings, I could very nearly take decent notes with the thing. (I still prefer paper and pencil for free-form notes, because it's faster and less error-prone, plus it's less confining than ASCII text -- I can draw diagrams, for example. At the same time, it's always nice not to have to type up my notes -- because they're already typed.)

That was all with the original Graffiti. I find that with Graffiti 2, I can't achieve anywhere near the speed and low error rate I had with the original. The worse failure, however, is that with Graffiti 2, I am concentrating far less on the content I am entering, and far more on how to enter it, than I was used to.

Here are three examples of how much Graffiti 2 sucks:

Using Graffiti 2, it is common for me to attempt to enter a word ending in an L, followed by a space. Usually, this case ends up with a T at the end of my word. (Turning "the full effect", for example, into "the fulteffect".) This error is extremely common, occurring 90% of the time.

Graffiti 2 almost always (75%) renders my H's as N's.

I tried to enter someone's phone number, in which a group of digits began with a 1. What did I end up with? Not "999-999-1999"; I got "999-999+999".

These failures are representative, but they are only a subset of what I was seeing. Graffiti 2 is constantly frustrating. It sucks.

The original Graffiti isn't just single-stroke, it's stateless, meaning that when I'm making a stroke, I don't have to think about what my last stroke is. Each stroke uniquely maps to a character. If Graffiti 2 was stateless, if, for example, a left-to-right stroke was only ever the horizontal line on the T, then it would be OK. But sometimes, when I draw a vertical followed by horizontal, I mean "T", and sometimes I mean "L-space", and so I have to think more carefully about what I'm doing. I have to remind myself, "I just drew an L. Now I either have to wait a second before entering my space, or I have to draw my line down on the bottom of the Graffiti entry area". But I only want to be thinking about the text I'm entering, not how to enter it. With Graffiti, I didn't have to think about it. With Graffiti 2, I do. Therefore, Graffiti 2 sucks.

Why does Graffiti 2 suck so bad? Based on its name, you might expect that Graffiti 2 is the second revision of Graffiti, with improved functionality and more features. If that's what you thought, you'd be wrong. Graffiti 2 is a direct result not of any engineering or marketing decisions, but of a court decision that the original Graffiti infringed on a patented Xerox technology called Unistrokes. I don't know a lot about the lawsuit, but apparently the court decided that Graffiti infringed Unistrokes precisely because of its one-to-one correspondence between a single stroke and a character. Therefore, Graffiti 2 is pretty much a crippled Graffiti, crippled just enough that it doesn't infringe on Unistrokes.

(To be precise, Graffiti 2 is a slightly modified version of CIC's Jot, itself created to sidestep the Unistrokes patent. The effect is the same. Jot had been trying to supplant Graffiti for years without much success. Now they have succeeded.)

Now, I know Palm didn't want to foist this garbage on me intentionally, but they did try to put lipstick on this pig by claiming that Graffiti 2 is "easier to learn", "more natural and intuitive" than Graffiti, but that's baloney. If it was really easier to learn, I'd have achieved a similar level of proficiency with it by now. Instead, I'm far behind where I was at the same point in learning Graffiti.

Graffiti 2 isn't all bad. To be fair, its design has some good points. I like Graffiti 2's "a" and "e", for example, and using the middle of the writing area for capitals is a good idea. The trouble is that its good points don't go anywhere near outweighing its deficiencies. And the deficiencies are all in the state-bound nature of the system. It's like any other aspect of product design: good design gets out of your way and lets you concentrate on what you're trying to accomplish. Bad design forces you to think about details of how the machine works, details which are irrelevant to your task.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. For example, I could always switch to using one of the way-hot Xerox PDAs, using Unistrokes.

Oh, wait. There's no such thing as a Xerox PDA, with or without Unistrokes; and there never has been. (Clearly, Xerox loves to develop technology that it never sells; and then it gets mad when somebody else successfully brings something similar to market.)

Since I do have a Sony CLIE, I can use the built-in keyboard, or one of two (two!) on-screen keyboards.

Another alternative, built into the NX-80V, is a system called Decuma, which is definitely very cool. This is a good high-resolution handwriting recognition system which isn't as fast as Graffiti, but it is more fun to use. I use it occasionally, and I can see how someone might use it as their primary means of entering text. Check it out and try it.

For a really good solution to this problem, however, what I really needed was to be able to install the original Graffiti on my new handheld. Fortunately, a little desperate digging produced a procedure for accomplishing just that, provided I had a Palm handheld with Graffiti already installed; and fortunately, I had one at hand: my CLIE NX-70V, the rumors of whose demise had been exaggerated. The procedure was easily followed, and worked exactly as advertised.

Now, I have a late-model CLIE with the original Graffiti installed, and it's great. And that's the way I'm going to keep it, until Xerox sues me.

More Car Than You Know How to Drive

I've always had a problem with SUVs. They're too big, they're too expensive, and they get lousy gas mileage. Although there are lots of legitimate reasons to own a truck, most people who buy SUVs don't need them, and only buy them for their status value. "Look, I can afford this!" (Yeah, well probably you're overextended.) Plus, people don't seem to modify their driving habits when they buy SUVs, so behavior which is just dumb in a car becomes positively dangerous. People drive their SUVs too fast in all kinds of weather, they follow other cars way too closely, and they don't know how to maneuver their trucks in tight corners.

Of course, it's none of my business what anyone else drives. You know? I'm drive-and-let-drive. If you want to spend more money than you can really afford to buy more car than you know how to drive, hey, that's what you want to do. It's dumb, but it's none of my business.

But then you had to go and rear-end my pregnant wife's car with your giant gas-sucking monstrosity! I think that's when it becomes my business.

My wife was flung forward in the collision, crushing our unborn child between her and her steering wheel. She was rushed to an emergency room, where I met her, and we spent an anxious day in the hospital, getting tests done and monitoring the baby to ensure that she wasn't hurt ... though of course we won't know for sure until she's born. In the meantime, my wife began having serious contractions, and the doctors had to give her body a pharmacological reminder that baby's not ready yet. It was a difficult and stressful day for both of us. Needless to say, neither one of us made it into the office that day.

I feel very confident that right after you nearly killed my wife and my daughter, you got to your office only a little late. You probably resented the imposition of having to talk to the police.

You claimed that there was ice on the road. This was on the second clear and sunny morning after a light snowfall. I don't think there was any ice on the road; there wasn't any when I visited the site later that evening. So what does that say about you? Well, what does an SUV say about almost anyone? You just hit a pregnant woman, and what are you worried about? You're worried about whether someone's going to actually demand any accountability from you.

Look, I think you just weren't paying attention. That's not an evil thing in of itself, but for God's sake, how can you not be paying attention when you're driving a 3,000 pound Deathmobile? It's irresponsible, is what it is. You have more car than you know how to drive.

You could kill somebody with that thing! And you don't seem to care about that. Idiot!





PS: Here's a timely link about the false economics of owning an SUV. It's not (usually) a rational choice, but I'm not pretending people buy SUVs for rational reasons.

The Importance of Earnest Music

My wife and I went to the first day of childbirthing class this morning, where among other things, my wife is supposed to learn some techniques to help her relax. In order to put everyone in the proper frame of mind, the instructor had set up a CD player to play relaxing music for the expecting couples. Which by itself, I don't have a problem with. I like to relax. I like it when my wife relaxes. And she's going to have to get good at it by the time she goes into labor.

But you know what? We don't get relaxed by any chimey-ass New Age music. When we came into the classroom, the CD player was playing something consisting of harp accompanied by pan flute. You know, yoga music, or upmarket massage music. Or downmarket massage music, for all I know. The kind of music that is usually accompanied by incense, and although it was very, very earnest, it was not soothing. It was, in fact, a little irritating. Plus, as this was the beginning of the day, we were wondering just what we had wandered into. As the harp finished plinking out its intro, and the pan flute whistled out its first few notes, like a sad little Zamfir, my wife turned to me. And she asked, "What do you suppose the name of this song is?"

"The name of the song is: 'Pleeeeeeease'."

Stick Some Velcro on the Back of These And I'm Good To Go

This is my cell phone. It's a Handspring Treo 300 running PalmOS 3.5. It's fun and easy to use, and since it's also a PalmOS device, it's convenient in lots of other ways (I'm not worried about losing my address book if I lost the phone, for example). I use it as my main email client when I'm traveling. I've noticed lately that I tend to use the speakerphone feature on this thing a lot, and I hold the phone in front of me as I speak. Then, when I'm done, I flip the cool lid down with a nice satisfying click.

This is my PDA. It's a Sony CLIE NX-80V running PalmOS 5.0. I've found it to be enormously useful in organizing my life. I keep my address book, my calendar, my to-do list, a calculator, a sketch pad, a web browser, another email client, and a notebook for writing. A lot of my work began life as a couple of paragraphs jotted down in the Palm Memo Pad. I haven't written a whole play on this thing yet, but I could if I needed to.

The coolest thing about this PDA, though, is that it's more than just a PDA. It's also a still photo camera, a movie recorder, and a voice recorder. Imagine that: it records three things...

I don't know if anyone's planning to come out with a phaser that runs PalmOS, but I'm pretty sure it'd be a very popular device, and I'd be right in line to get one if I could. I guess once I've started down that road, it's only a matter of time before I started wearing form-fitting shirts in bright primary colors and high-heeled black leather boots, so probably it's all for the best that no such product exists.

I don't think it's an accident that these things look like Star Trek gear. Or maybe the prop guys on Star Trek were just pretty good industrial designers. Either way, I can't open that Treo without wanting to ask Scotty to beam me up, and I can't open the CLIE without wanting to scan for lifeforms. If I had the PalmOS phaser, I guess I'd be looking for Klingons or malevolent computers to shoot, so again, it's probably all for the best that no such product exists.

"Temporarily Out of Service"

At what point does it become more trouble than it's worth to own a computer? Or several? This is the question I've been asking myself after a rather hellish string of failures. In the space of a single week, my main computer checked out, my Sony CLIE fizzled, and my office Thinkpad came down with a bad case of Adware. In the process of restoring from these failures, I came dangerously close to the point of fundamentally questioning whether the investment of money, time and energy I put into these machines is really paying a worthwhile dividend.

Now consider. I have been a computer enthusiast for as long as I can remember. I have programmed computers for my entire adult life and my whole professional career. Not only do I have a lot of knowledge and experience regarding how to work around computer difficulties, I have also gained a certain level of immunity from computer frustration. Plus, I am fanatical about keeping my data backed up (and so far this week, I haven't lost any data), so I don't have any anxiety and frustration around that. But even with these provisions in place, the past week has been really trying. What do ordinary people do when they're faced with these issues?

I'm starting to think they just grin and bear it, until they can't take it anymore, and then they just bail. My father was so frustrated by the internet, for example, that he permanently disconnected from it, deciding that email and the web weren't worth the hassle of spam, viruses and pop-ups. He hasn't bailed on computers entirely, but I know that he is constantly experiencing inexplicable failures and weird behavior with his applications. He asks me about them –- a lot -– but he uses obscure programs which I am not familiar with (like Serif), and I rarely get a chance to sit down with him at his computer to see the behavior, so I can't help him much.

Another couple of friends of mine, after valiantly trying to make do in the Windows world, have decided to bail into the Macintosh world. Macs seem to cost more upfront, but apparently they are happier and less frustrated now. That's not really an option for me, not yet, but who knows? A couple more weeks like this one, and I might be tempted.

I thought my friends and my father were just outliers. I'm beginning to wonder about that now.

So what was my week like?

First to fail, naturally, was my main computer, the one I do most of my work at home with. I have a real love/hate relationship with this laptop, which I bought back in August 2004. When it works, it works great. It's fast, it's powerful, and it's very pretty. The trouble is that in the six months I've owned this machine, I have brought it back to the shop to be serviced four times, and it's been in the shop for a total of about a full month. The last time I brought it in, it was because I had plugged a USB device into the computer, only to watch it turn off like a light bulb. (No blue screen, no restarts, just –- pffft! -- dead.) It took the manufacturer a month to decide it wasn't worth repairing the motherboard, so they just sent me a new machine. This time, I plugged a USB device –- not the same device! -- into the computer, and promptly lost the use of all my USB ports. Granted, that's better, and less panic-inducing, than simply checking out, so that's an improvement. But it still puts a crimp in my ability to use the computer, because now I can't print, I can't use my mouse, I can't Hotsync. I couldn't even use the built-in flash card readers, because they're USB devices internally. So now, for the fourth time, I brought this computer down to the service department (which is an hour's drive from my home), to be fixed or replaced by, oh who knows? Let's just say, at some unknown date in the future. Maybe in another couple of weeks. When I complained to the service manager about the level of reliability of this machine, this is what he actually said:

"If you were to come into the store today, I would refuse sale of this machine to you. This machine is pressing the envelope of what's really possible in a laptop. You're the sort of customer that falls in love with the specs, and you don't have a realistic expectation of how reliable these machines really are."

See? I'm just being unrealistic. It's clearly unreasonable of me to pay $2500 for a computer and expect better than 80% uptime. It's just absurd of me to expect that when I plug a USB device into my computer, the machine continues to run. Who ever heard of such a thing?

It will probably take another two, or possibly three or four weeks for this machine to be replaced. They were nice enough to remove the main drive and put it into a nice USB drive enclosure for me, so I'm able to keep working. In the meantime, I've renamed this machine to "Hangar Queen". Fortunately, it's still under warranty, so it's only costing me a boatload of my time, and I have the last laptop I bought from these people, which is still running like a champ. (Ironically, I bought the new machine because I'd had such a good experience with this last computer.)

A couple of days after this failure, I put my handheld (a CLIE NX-70V) into its cradle to Hotsync with my work computer. Now this is something I have literally done about 500 times before without any trouble at all. This time, my CLIE decided to check out. In a fashion eerily similar to the experience I had with the laptop, this machine's screen went black, and it simply stopped working. It wouldn't react to a hard reset or any other action I could think of.

Well, I can make do without my laptop, especially since we have other computers in the house, but I was really put out by losing my handheld. I've had a Palm of some type ever since 1996, and I've got practically my entire life encoded on the thing. (Ever since my car got jacked in '95, with my Day-Timer in the trunk, I knew I needed a way to keep my data safe, and the original Palm Pilot fit the bill. Since then, I was hooked.) I didn't lose my Address Book, my Calendar, or my legendary To-Do List: I've got it all backed up Nine Ways To Tuesday. But I couldn't carry it with me without the CLIE.

I don't know if it was because of my computer dying earlier in the week, or because Sony has discontinued their whole PDA line, but I kind of panicked. Since they're no longer available in stores, I got on to eBay and immediately bought a replacement CLIE. This was the NX-70's big brother, the CLIE NX-80V, but I wasn't going to have it for another few days. Like I said, I was in a bit of a panic. I went down to the local Staples and I bought a brand-new Palm Tungsten T5.

"You did what?" said my wife. "We're about to have a baby, and I've been working hard for the past six months to save money on all the baby gear we have to buy, and you go and blow almost a grand on two new PDAs? I'm OK with you getting one to replace the one that broke. I know how much you rely on that thing. But two? No. You have to return one of them – and get the money back."

Well, that's what my wife would say if we were living in TV Land.

In real life, where my wife's understanding and patience are truly astounding, she said she would really, really like it if I would return one of the two units and get the money back. I told her that I would take a few days, try them both out, and let her know. So I spent about five hours laboriously reconstructing my life on the Tungsten, restoring files and settings from my backups, reinstalling software, and ensuring that everything was safe (It's about a 20-step process. I know that because I'm thorough. But it wasn't conceptually hard, just tedious). Then I spent a couple of days living my life out of the Tungsten, to see if I liked it. And so, when the CLIE arrived, I wasn't sure I wanted to try it. Suppose it was better than the Tungsten? Then I'd have wasted my time, and I'd have to go through the exercise of migrating my data all over again.

In the end, of course, that's what I did. I found a lot to like about the Tungsten, but in the end, I had to bring it back. It's a marvelous machine, but there's not much it does better than the CLIE, and the CLIE does quite a few things better than the Tungsten. Like, it has a camera. And a voice recorder. And Wi-Fi. And it's faster, even though it's running a "slower" processor. And I had all these CLIE peripherals around already. And I could put the CLIE into a real cradle. One thing the Tungsten had over the CLIE was that the newer OS5 apps were more polished, and did a few minor things better than the CLIE's versions. In the end, this didn't outweigh the value of the CLIE.

So now I had one new live CLIE, and I had one old dead CLIE, and I had just returned the Tungsten, and I was searching on the net for any information about CLIEs dying the way mine had a week ago. And just by accident, I found an article which recommended a procedure I hadn't tried before; in fact, I had never heard of it before: an "In-Cradle Reset". Since I had nothing to lose, I tried it on my old CLIE, and what do you know? It came up just fine. After all that time and money...

Finally, this past weekend. After all my computer woes, I was looking forward to a nice quiet weekend without any major failures. That's when my wife said:

"Honey? Can I surf the web using your work laptop?"

Isn't there a joke that starts this way?

I didn't think twice about it. What could go wrong? My wife is not a novice computer user. She knows her way around a machine and around the net. She reads the news and her favorite blogs.

So why, after only a few minutes of my wife's surfing, was my work machine crawling with popups, adware, and spyware?

When she asked me about it, I was surprised. I wasn't getting any pop-ups or spyware before my wife started surfing. "What did you do?" I asked her, perhaps with a little bit too much of an accusatory tone to my voice.

"Nothing! I was just surfing."

"With what browser?"

"Internet Explorer."

That told me pretty much everything I needed to know. See, I don't use IE on my work machine, except to access a few inhouse applications. For general web surfing on my work machine, I only use Firefox, and I manage the security on Firefox pretty well. Unfortunately, because I only use IE inside a well-protected network firewall, I don't manage the security there so well, and apparently it only takes a few minutes of surfing before malicious programs take advantage of a poorly-secured instance of IE, and my machine was badly infected. The adware had burrowed deep into the guts of Windows, and IE pop-ups were appearing even when I used Firefox to browse to a site!

The infestation proved to be very hardy and difficult to remove. When I used Spybot – Search and Destroy to clean out the infections, they managed to reinstall themselves by the next reboot. They were hardy little devils. When I used msconfig to disable Startup items which might be reinstalling these applications, I noticed that they were adding themselves back to the startup list! ("Who writes these things?" my wife asked. It's a good question.) A little bit of detective work actually yielded two Spyware items which had installed themselves just like normal applications, with their own folders, their own start menu entries, even their own uninstallers. One had a text file explaining itself:

"You downloaded Preview AdService from a Website that is able to offer its content for free because it shows the Preview AdService ActiveX popup. The Preview AdService program is installed only once the user has agreed on it by clicking on 'yes'. Through the ActiveX, the user can review the license terms and privacy policy before installing the software. Each and every distributor is carefully reviewed to make sure that their distribution techniques abide by a strict code of conduct."

See, that's total bullshit.

"I never downloaded anything or clicked on any license agreement," my wife told me, and I believe her. It's my work machine -– she wouldn't download anything on it. "All I did was surf to some sites and read."

It took me a while longer to finish fixing the problems with the pop-ups. In the end, I had to manually delete files from the Windows\System32 directory, which I do not recommend for the faint of heart. I kind of think I overdid it, in fact, because now I seem to be unable to connect to my company's VPN from home. However, otherwise, my work computer seems to be fine, which is a good thing, and the pop-ups have not afflicted it since. Total cost to me: practically the whole weekend. And I still wish I understood what I was doing better.

All three of these little tales of computer woe, different as they are, have a few things in common. In each case, a very large failure occurs for poorly understood reasons, each failure is followed by a tedious restoration to the status quo, and in each case, there is no good reason to expect that it won't happen again -- without warning.

People do not get a kick out of maintaining their computers. They do not derive enjoyment and life value from backing up, troubleshooting, and restoring their computers. They derive enjoyment and value from having access to their applications and data. When a computer fails, it often marks a profound downward shift in the value it represents to the owner. When the owner is someone like me, who has the time, patience, knowledge, experience, and cash to solve the problems, that's one thing. I'm just put out by my computers. But I think computers have gotten both so complex and so fragile, in such a short period of time, that nonspecialists have no good recourse when their machines fail. They either replace the machines –- if they can afford to -– or they simply stop using the machines. In either case, they usually lose whatever data they had on their machines.

A machine which is not reliable and unobtrusive, which calls attention to itself, which requires undue amounts of bother and care just to stay stable, is not a machine which is creating value. When snarky technicians claim that I'm being unreasonable for demanding an entirely appropriate level of service, they're not helping the problem.

I'm not sure what it is about my computers I fear more: their unreliability or their opacity. If I could count on my computers more, I wouldn't care so that they're black boxes. On the other hand, if I could understand my computer better, I wouldn't fear their failures so much. But I doubt I'm going to get either wish. The way we build computers, and the software that runs them, seems only to head in the direction of increased complexity, meaning increasingly unstable and insecure systems, exposing fewer clues about their inner state to the user. I wonder whether this will reach a point where it starts to turn off ordinary users, and whether they will turn away from what they view –- correctly, in my judgement -- as a hostile technology. I wonder whether that's already occurring. It almost happened to me this past week.