There’s a uniquely betrayed feeling you get when you lose work because your computer has crashed. I’m in the middle of developing a flash tutorial animation for my client(yes, I do do real work) to explain to their customers how the moderately complex security system protecting their data works. I was working on some tricky buttons, trying to get the flash version of a web page to work the way the real web page does so I can simulate navigating the real site.<\/p>\n
So the message that Flash had performed an illegal action and would now be shut down was, to put it mildly, unwelcome.<\/p>\n
It’s a familiar feeling, and this particular time I probably lost no more than an hour or at most two of work. Plus, since I remember what I did, I can probably recreate it much faster than I spent creating the work the first time. So instead of feeling rage and the overwhelming need to throw the monitor out the window (not the smartest idea for a whole long laundry list of reasons, not the least of which is that the monitor was simply the messenger and what I really need to do is throw the Flash development team out the window), I instead have the wounded spouse’s self-condemning feeling that it was, in some way, my fault: I knew the program wasn’t completely stable, I’ve had problems with it before, and yet, I went back to pretending that everything was ok. Plus, I didn’t save my work frequently enough.<\/p>\n
While my desktop is still in the process of trying to kill the loose threads in its memory and shut itself down (advising me gently but, it appears, futilely, that I should wait for its interminable cleanup process to track the rogue threads down and purge them in a safe way) I turn to the laptop, connect to Blogger, and type this note. And you know what? Blogger hasn’t crashed yet, but the laptop–which has died three times already today, although since I had nothing unsaved any of those times has avoided my wrath–is equally, if not more fallible, and I’m just running from one abusive relationship to another here.<\/p>\n
Not to draw this whole rather unsavory metaphor out too much, but it’s interesting how readily the world as a whole has dumped the slow, boring, and safe mainframes, that never crash<\/b>, and moved whole heartedly to the snazzy, sexy, dangerous PCs that keep coming back to hurt us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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