The technology rollercoaster
This has been an interesting week (really last week – this blog didn’t post and I didn’t notice :-() of ups and downs. It started with downs: I installed drivers for my EasiDock 1000EV on my Mocha 7042 and ended up unbootable with the dreaded mup.sys hang. I finally gave up and reinstalled (first W2K3, until I discovered I can’t install my Bluetooth mouse/keyboard drivers on it, then WinXP). User files were recovered without issue, but it was a huge waste of time ... reinstalling Office, Visual Studio, etc. takes forever. And, at the same time, my Smartphone gave up syncing with Exchange. I was playing with the new Whidbey release at the same time, without a lot of success – compatibility with the PDC bits seems pretty darn low. Everything seemed to be breaking.
Time for the ups. I started installing everything under various Virtual PCs. Now I have nice isolation between different environments, and I can move my Virtual PC images between machines on an external USB drive. This is a nice approach.
Then today I installed Lookout (“Google for Outlook”). It was a snap. It’s busy indexing my mail as we speak, without any perceptible consumption of resources. This is very much unlike other programs of this ilk, which generally completely dominate your machine.
We used to call this bogon flux (when we were geeky teenagers … now we’re geeky adults) – there seemed to be a high occurrence of “everything breaking at once”, so it had to be some kind of field effect. Still seems to be true.
