When I was getting ready to go to work (school work, not Unsanity work) this morning I had a crazy hankering for Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Amazingly when I arrived there was a small box of said doughnuts in the "coffee" area. I happily helped myself to one, and only one, because I didn't want to get greedy even though usually the amount of doughnuts in the box only decreases by one at the end of the day. Honestly, this is the main reason I go to WWDC is for the free Krispy Kremes and the Gummy Bears. Mmm... Gummy Venus de Milo.

The school district's minimum requirement for a teacher's primary computer is a Power Mac 5500. Any teacher with a computer not meeting these requirements would be lynched. I mean, they'd be given a "teacher Dell" which is an Optiplex GX260 with an ATI Radeon 7500 (with video out, mirroring, dual displays and capturing), DVD-CDRW Combo drive, 256megs RAM and a 17 inch monitor that sells for $1,025.38. Instead they were given a second-hand Transource computer with a 500Mhz Celeron, a 48x CD-ROM Drive, some lame video card that only does video out (to TV, mirroring only) and a VIA VT82C692BX chipset. Transource no longer makes these computers.

All the Transources were wiped and re-imaged at the high school for this area before being shipped here (a middle school). Problem is, they were incorrectly configured. Office was installed and set to run "off the network". Which meant that it could only run if a particular network share was mounted. A network share shared from the high school. Granted, I could log into the high school and mount the share but then the teachers wouldn't be able to access their personal files and whenever they shut down (which I tell them to never, ever do) or restart, I'd have to log back in so they could use Office or check their email. The email program is Outlook 2002 and the first time it's ran, it does a little wizard thing which works great. But if you open Outlook before fixing the Office install (by running Word and giving it the data1.msi file it needs) then you must cancel the Outlook install which cancels the wizard. The wizard does not rerun and subsequent launches and must be run in order to complete the install. Every time I launched Outlook, it would use the partial settings from the wizard and then freeze. The only fix was to delete all the profiles and all the data files Outlook uses on the machine, uninstall Outlook then reinstall it. This whole problem took 5 hours to fix because of a slow network (Outlook installer was on the network shared).

Then today I got a work-order for a Dell that wouldn't boot and was showing the error "Invalid System Disk". Yes, this is incredibly easy to fix, just eject the floppy and hit the keyboard. I will cannot and will not blame this on the teacher. This is a PC problem and she should have never expected that to be a problem if she hasn't used PCs before and experienced this error. When a Mac encounters an invalid System Folder on a CD or some other removable media, it will go to the next device to find one. PCs should be as smart. I could change the boot order in the BIOS but I can't remember the password and I shouldn't have to resort to these methods. Needless to say, I really don't like PCs at all.