d.valued's Journal: pain and suffering: transferring a windows system

Last night I spent seven hours on transferring data from one computer to another the hard way, aka through physical medium transfer.

Eww.

I had to reboot his 2000 box twice to get it to copy files, and it even missed his bookmarks in Mozilla.

Eww eww eww.

The hard part, though, was moving a laptop hard drive in there. For those of you who don't know, laptop hard drives typically have a mini IDE connection which needs a small dongle to connect to a standard bus. Problem with it is, it doesn't stay there. No plastic housing. So I had to reseat the drive three, four times.

I hate Windows. I hate moving data to and from it more.

Now I'm getting complaints about his old software not working. I try to explain the Registry, but the idea is so alien to me, a hardcore *nixer, that I can't swallow it.

--

A little about me: I've a knack for languages. And I don't mean Perl, Python, or C++, which I have a handle on. I mean human ones.

I'm studying Arabic, and I would recommend the language be studied by anyone who wants a grip of what the hell is going on in the Middle East. That, and Hebrew, which honestly is damn near the same language.

At least the Standard Arabic is. Arabic is so fragmented it's obscene. It makes the diff between British and American look like the result of a lisp. An Iraqi and a Libyan have zero chance of understanding each other using local dialects.

And this makes the language more fun: there are no written vowels. The beautiful scripts you see are all consonants, since someone bright thought that the only people intelligent enough to read would know how to pronounce the word. Then again, Hebrew was like that too. (OT Hebrew is all consonents.)

Once I get the hang of this, I'll try an easier tongue, like Japanese or maybe Mayan.

salaam