Network Administrator

I haven’t blogged in a while. I have had a lot going on, including having my living room repainted. I wanted to share a funny thing that happened tonight.

Last weekend, I helped my brother fix his wireless network. Today, his wife called. “I can’t get my laptop to connect to the network. The message it gave me said to contact the network administrator for help.” I knew the message she meant. We laughed. “It said to contact the person who set up our network, and since you helped set it up, I’m calling you.” I didn’t mind of course, but still silently cursed Microsoft for yet another completely unhelpful message.

It struck me as really funny. Why the hell does Windows XP Home still have that stupid message? In a business environment it makes sense, but Windows has such wide use in the home sector, it just seems ridiculous. Most home users will not have a network administrator to contact. Give me Linux any day.

We did get the network working. We had to disable McCafee and reboot. Of course, I then had to tell her that she didn’t have to worry about the scary looking message informing her that she had decided to customize which programs run upon startup! Oh the horror! We can’t have the slaves doing that! Give me Linux any day.

Speaking of Linux, I have Talking Arch Linux running on my netbook and on my desktop as well now. It works nicely for the most part, though I have experienced some problems with the latest Firefox and Orca. It’ll work out.