Frustration with computers

I just can’t win over here.

poindex­ter gave me two SCSI CD-ROMs to replace the CD-ROM that died the day I put it in to replace the old dou­ble-speed dri­ve. Open­ing up the case and installing the CD-ROM dri­ve into the exter­nal SCSI case isn’t that involved, but it’s still a pain in the ass to keep on open­ing the case, unscrew­ing all the screws that hold the rails to the dri­ve, reat­tach­ing all the cables and so on.

So first was the old dri­ve. It just stopped read­ing disks. Then I bought one from eBay. As I men­tioned, it died with­in hours of instal­la­tion. The motor that opens the tray stopped work­ing, and when I removed the dri­ve from the case today, a cog actu­al­ly fell right out of it. Into the trash it went. Ten bucks down the drain.

I tried the CD‑R next, but the SGI box would­n’t read disks with it. I don’t know if maybe the instruc­tion set is dif­fer­ent for a SCSI CD-ROM as for a SCSI CD‑R, so I shrugged and went on to the sec­ond dri­ve I got from poindex­ter.

The Irix instal­la­tion process requires that every CD in the set be put in the dri­ve before the install starts so that the install pro­gram can see what pack­ages are in the CD set, which seems like a bone­head­ed way to go about it, but what­ev­er. Part of the fun of pro­pri­etary Unices is fig­ur­ing out the utter­ly obscure puz­zles that some moron devel­op­er called an installer.

Now, about twen­ty times of open­ing the CD tray and clos­ing it again, and read­ing all the pack­age lists off of each one, now the tray has stopped open­ing and clos­ing. When I push the eject but­ton, the device makes a hor­rid buzzing sound for about thir­ty sec­onds and stops. So it looks like the CD tray motor on this dri­ve is shot, too.

Have you heard of the peo­ple that claim that their body emits an elec­tri­cal field that destroys elec­tric and elec­tron­ic devices? Sup­pos­ed­ly there is some­thing dif­fer­ent in their bio­elec­tric sys­tem that caus­es watch­es to stop with­in a few days of being on such a per­son­’s wrist. I used to dis­miss those sto­ries as super­sti­tious non­sense, but I’m begin­ning to turn into a believ­er. No Win­dows machine will con­nect to any net­work when I’m in the room, no CD-ROM sur­vives con­tact with me, no device dri­vers I’ve installed have ever worked, I’ve nev­er seen any OS install run suc­cess­ful­ly as doc­u­ment­ed and every piece of soft­ware I’ve ever installed has devel­oped a fatal flaw or incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty that the devel­op­ers have claimed nev­er to have seen before.

Either that or the entire tech­nol­o­gy indus­try is shot through with shod­dy work process­es, incom­pe­tent work­ers and dis­hon­est man­age­ment. Oh, wait, we already know that’s true. Nev­er mind.

PS appar­ent­ly two years of dis­use has bro­ken my Zip dri­ve. I took the disks to a rental com­put­er at a copy shop and sure enough, the disks are good. How did my Zip dri­ve break with­out my ever try­ing to use it? Arrrgh.