Foreign Soil
Last week I was in Brisbane (where I lived for the first 24 of my years) for work meetings. I travel here roughly every 3 months; its interesting to see what has changed since my last visit.
At the end of the first day I catch a taxi to the hotel. The taxi driver is the talkative type I abhor – personally I look forward to the robot taxi’s they have in some science fiction. He asks about where I obtained the jacket I am wearing and he is confused by my answer of “Parliament”. Do they not have that store here or is this guy just ignorant?
I have visited the hotel I have stayed in before; its the kind of place you dont want to spend any time in. Adequate for sleeping but the design sense is.. lacking. At least its clean.
Having established I’m not a local, the taxi driver moves to the obvious question of why I am here. My answer compels him to tell a story of when he once used Excel to average some numbers, from which he concludes computers are easy whilst also claiming he doesn’t understand them. What this story has to do with software development isn’t clear to me.
His computer story continues to some problem with his broadband and “Mozilla Firefox”. This intrigues me – both due to his prefix of Mozilla and that this apparently minimum-requirements computer user is not using Internet Explorer.
The final story of my trip is a confused tale of doing something in the registry. This is somewhat conflicting – why is this self-described computer illiterate person making changes to the registry. And where has the Windows-world gone wrong that people have to resort to this level of chicanery.
A perhaps little known fact is that Linux (or more precisely, Gnome) has a registry too. I don’t know much beyond that – I’ve never had to use it, and certainly don’t know what’s in there or why I might need to alter a setting.
During the meetings, I watched a coworker struggle to login to a Windows shared folder. He typed his login details into the popup box, and pressed enter. The window reappears – must be the wrong password? He tries again, and then a third time, each time giving the same result. Frustrated he gives up and presses “Escape” to cancel the action, at which point the folder he was trying to access appears.
I don’t know why the wider world – and particularly technical users – cling to Windows. The popular belief amongst the power users is that linux is somehow hard to use and yet somehow the ongoing grief Windows visibly causes these people is glossed over.