Whenever I visit my girlfriend's parents in New York, I get to solve a computer problem. And I'm reminded of how very painful of a world it must be for those people who aren't as familiar with computers as I am. For instance, today I spent 2 hours, on and off, trying to get their HP Deskjet 5550 to stop displaying all of its configuration windowns in French. It took 20 minutes to navigate their support site and discover that uninstalling and re-installing the printer driver was all I needed. Then it took an hour and 40 minutes to figure out how to reinstall it. In lieu of "my windows xp installation CD", I google for the one file it wanted, sRGB.icm, downloaded it from dubious sources, and fed that to the installer instead.
That sounds like a great avenue for a virus. If you can find some way to write a maliciously structured sRGB.icm file, and place it online so that google can find it, (google for "srgb.icm filetype:icm"), you could bring down a lot of people's computers. I'm sure I'm not the first to have this problem, nor am I the first to have this solution. Well, let's hope I downloaded an sRGB.icm that will do no harm...
Tomorrow night I'll be celebrating Sukkot with my my gracious Westchester county hosts. Do you know what Sukkot is? Neither did I, but now there's a makeshift shed setup in their backyard, and we just spent an hour hanging pinecones and gourds from it. I hear tomorrow we'll go out there and eat fettucine alfredo. I believe technically you're supposed to eat and sleep in the sukkah in your yard, but most people only eat meals there these days, if they build a sukka at all. This is my introduction to this celebration of the holiday... I guess my observation here, is that after years of dating a Jewish girl, I feel like I'll never really know all the holidays they have. I mean, they just keep on coming.
Posted by Ethan at October 19, 2005 01:37 PM