Tuesday 14 September 1999

Crates & stuff
Pic of the day: The workplace is starting to look quite homey ... computer-related things scattered everywhere!
...

It's been a pretty wild day at work. Quite a lot of the new computers are unpacked, and the first of the users have changed over from small grey dumb terminal to large, crisp, colorful PCs. The success has not been total, though. The server and the network had to be taken down a few times, and some users have been forced to change password repeatedly. Remember, some of these are people who don't change passwords every year. It is quite an excitement for them.

You'd think that Staffman would meet mercy today after the troubles and tribulations of yesterday. No such luck for my friend. His PC, and his alone, chose subtly to not work. Not just the server and network flukes that all of them got. No, his particular PC got derailed in starting up, he did not get to set his printer, and the picture looks different. "Never again!" says Staffman, and he sounds like he means it.

With all the brand new PCs getting hot, the place started to smell more and more like a chemical factory. I was quite pleased to get out of there. Who would have thought that there could be too many new computers??

...

This, however, happened on the old dumb terminals. A cute coworker calls me: There is something wrong with [program]. After a while I show up.
Cute Coworker demonstrates: "I fill in this field and this field. I clear this field by pressing [key], and fill in this field and this. I save. When I try to go to the next page, it complains that [field] should not be filled in. How do you clear a field?"
Me: "Press [key]?"
CC: "It worked! Fantastic! How could you know that?"
Me: "You just told me. You said you pressed [key] to clear a field."
CC: "You understand everything. Sometimes it's enough that you just stand there."

Not that I mind this kind of jobs. They are pretty much what I signed on for. Being indispensible without needing to think, much less do anything, almost justifies working at a meaningless bureaucracy for a rather meagre salary. But, as things tend to do, it also made me think.

Have you also noted how sometimes your skills seem to change just by another person being there? Or your perceptions or the way you think? I have. And I've got comments like the one above too often to count. "It's easy as long as you are there." "Of course I can do it now that you are here." Strange, isn't it?

I experience this a lot with my best friend. Listening to music with her is different from listening to the same music without her. Now, in all honesty she often has introduced me to music that I like but had never heard of, and she's justly proud of it. But even listening to the same music when she is not there, it is sometimes not the same. Once we bought some synthesizer music, I think it was based on the Columbus anniversary, and it was really great. Like, moving. Then the next day I listened to it while she was still sleeping. It was so tame, almost boring. Creepy, isn't it?

I wonder if this count as objective proof that there is a spiritual reality that interacts with the physical one. I guess music is not the most measurable thing. But if we could show by repeated experiments that a broad range of people solve logical problems easier when I am in the room, wouldn't that prove something? Or are humans simply too easily swayed by our own imagination to be a reliable measure of anything?

...

And finally, a tidbit from a recent issue of New Scientist: The course handbook for second-year neuropharmacology students at the University of Manchester promises a lab based practical session on the "relationship between concentration and effect of ethanol in human volunteers".

Some people are studying the world of spirits, it seems.


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