Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Arm-wrestling With Technology

So, the Queen of Science got an MP3 player for her birthday. On the ghosts of Oppenheimer and Darwin, that was the damned longest continued struggle with technology I've ever had.

The Queen has a laptop which she uses for basic stuff--word processing, etc. We don't connect it to the net much, so we've kept it with the same basic Windows XP that it came with. Well, last generation's MP3 player can't work without Service Pack 2 and the most recent version of WMP. We're on dial-up. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

At noon (we started the SP2 download at 8), I go to work where, we have high-speed. Additionally, woot has just delivered one of the 4 gig USB drives. Oh good, I'll just download it at work, then take it home. Only the USB drive doesn't work. I spend some ten minutes trying to figure out why it doesn't work, and eventually borrow a different drive to put the stuff on.

Installation takes its time. We check yes to the EULA we don't read, we install SP2, we install WMP. We install the program that makes the MP3 player go. We plug the MP3 player in, according to instructions. The computer cannot figure out that the fuck it is. Contrary to the instructions (thanks, manual writers!) we eventually figure out that we have to install the MP3 player as a piece of hardware. And viola, a mere thirteen hours after it was unwrapped, we listened to the first MP3 off her new player.

Ain't technology grand?

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