This is dedicated to all the people who work without fanfare.
You may see us or not
You may not know what we do
But know that our jobs
Are meant to serve you
We do our work well
Our knowledge and experience complete
And most people don't know
For we are the discrete
We make things go right
In ways that most do not know
Quietly earning our paychecks
And without a big show
We toil in the background
Hands and heads to the task
And a trust in our abilities
Is all that we ask
Our jobs are anonymous
Unheralded in story or song
But if our work is done right
Then nothing goes wrong
Lauren Swartzmiller 04/15/14
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Monday, April 14, 2014
Poetry for a Monday Morning
Relax and enjoy.
Morning Coffee Haiku
I start the day the same old way
I have my coffee without much to say
Caffeine is my friend and it's yours, too
For I tend to babble without my brew
Intelligent talk and making sense
Come sometime after first sip, hence
Back away slowly and no one gets hurt
And patiently wait for me to be more alert
©Lauren Swartzmiller 09/04/2010
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Too Much Time on my Hands
A discussion with someone yesterday keeps prompting this philosophical wax-covered riddle to run through my brain like the tune "Three Blind Mice".
if ignorance is bliss
and knowledge is power
but power corrupts
where is the middle ground
when the knowledge is easily accessible
and one's own curiosity is insatiable?
I feel like I'm going to have a breakthrough moment like that person in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" who figured out the answer right before the planet got destroyed. That would be my timing.
No, no herbs were smoked, no alcohol consumed, no peyote popped, no pills ingested to bring this on. It's pure, unadulterated absurdity of my own making on a Thursday. Imagine what Friday's going to be like.
Three blind mice, three blind mice, see how they run, see how they run ....
if ignorance is bliss
and knowledge is power
but power corrupts
where is the middle ground
when the knowledge is easily accessible
and one's own curiosity is insatiable?
I feel like I'm going to have a breakthrough moment like that person in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" who figured out the answer right before the planet got destroyed. That would be my timing.
No, no herbs were smoked, no alcohol consumed, no peyote popped, no pills ingested to bring this on. It's pure, unadulterated absurdity of my own making on a Thursday. Imagine what Friday's going to be like.
Three blind mice, three blind mice, see how they run, see how they run ....
Tuesday, April 08, 2014
The XP Hermit
I’ve been a Windows XP user for over 10 years. Come tomorrow, when support for the XP operating system will have withered and died, I’ll still be an XP user, at least in part.
I have three computers. Do I need three? Not really, but I like having a backup so that if things go wrong, there’s still a computer available to me for both work and play. It was two at one point, an older (11 years) desktop and a newer (5 years) laptop. Although one ran Windows XP and the other Windows 7, I was able to get them to interact enough to trade files, which is all I needed.
In May of last year, the network card on the desktop was fried by a lightning strike nearby. Surprisingly, nothing else was damaged and I could still use it. But, my two computers could no longer “talk” to one another and exchanges between them became a thing of the past. Shortly after that, though, I received a free laptop. Well, a free laptop with keyboard damage and a slowness issue its previous owner no longer wanted to deal with. It was an older model and also running Windows XP, but it more than met my needs. So, for the cost of having a new keyboard installed and a few hours of my deleting a bunch of software that was clogging up both memory and drive space, I had a third computer, although the newest member got stored away as a “just in case” machine as I continued to use the other two.
Cut to late last year, when Microsoft officially announced it was dropping support for the XP operating system. I was like most XP users, without the funds to upgrade to a bigger, better, faster machine. But unlike other XP users, I was fortunate for one thing. The laptop was purchased back in the days of job and extra funds. At the same time, I also bought Windows 7 software. It was intended for the older desktop, but I found out after buying it and opening the package that the desktop would need so many hardware upgrades that buying a new computer made more sense. I didn’t want to do that, so the software sat unused until this year.
I didn’t try to load it onto the XP laptop when I got it because I figured it would be similarly unable to handle the new OS. Well, that was wrong. On a whim last week, I tried it and it worked. It required over 100 updates and 5 hours of frustratingly waiting for them to download and install and restarting it over and over and over, but it was worth the aggravation.
So, Windows 7 is now the two-thirds majority in the house. If Microsoft follows the same timetable for dropping operating system support that it did for the XP, I’ve got at least a decade before Windows 7 obsolesces. The younger laptop will likely be able to handle an OS upgrade, but the most recently acquired laptop probably won’t.
As for the desktop unable to upgrade and still running Windows XP, it’s alive and well and will continue to be so off the internet grid even after tomorrow. It won’t get updates for any software anymore, but since it’s not communicating with the outside world and doesn’t do much beyond word processing, a few spreadsheets and some games, it’s no big deal. It’s isolated, but still very functional. Eventually, it will meet its demise, its innards recycled and its shell, sadly, likely ending up in a landfill somewhere. But for the time being, it will continue on in spite of Microsoft’s choice to drop it like a hot potato.
It’s a hermit, not by choice, but by necessity, and it’s a working hermit at that.
I have three computers. Do I need three? Not really, but I like having a backup so that if things go wrong, there’s still a computer available to me for both work and play. It was two at one point, an older (11 years) desktop and a newer (5 years) laptop. Although one ran Windows XP and the other Windows 7, I was able to get them to interact enough to trade files, which is all I needed.
In May of last year, the network card on the desktop was fried by a lightning strike nearby. Surprisingly, nothing else was damaged and I could still use it. But, my two computers could no longer “talk” to one another and exchanges between them became a thing of the past. Shortly after that, though, I received a free laptop. Well, a free laptop with keyboard damage and a slowness issue its previous owner no longer wanted to deal with. It was an older model and also running Windows XP, but it more than met my needs. So, for the cost of having a new keyboard installed and a few hours of my deleting a bunch of software that was clogging up both memory and drive space, I had a third computer, although the newest member got stored away as a “just in case” machine as I continued to use the other two.
Cut to late last year, when Microsoft officially announced it was dropping support for the XP operating system. I was like most XP users, without the funds to upgrade to a bigger, better, faster machine. But unlike other XP users, I was fortunate for one thing. The laptop was purchased back in the days of job and extra funds. At the same time, I also bought Windows 7 software. It was intended for the older desktop, but I found out after buying it and opening the package that the desktop would need so many hardware upgrades that buying a new computer made more sense. I didn’t want to do that, so the software sat unused until this year.
I didn’t try to load it onto the XP laptop when I got it because I figured it would be similarly unable to handle the new OS. Well, that was wrong. On a whim last week, I tried it and it worked. It required over 100 updates and 5 hours of frustratingly waiting for them to download and install and restarting it over and over and over, but it was worth the aggravation.
So, Windows 7 is now the two-thirds majority in the house. If Microsoft follows the same timetable for dropping operating system support that it did for the XP, I’ve got at least a decade before Windows 7 obsolesces. The younger laptop will likely be able to handle an OS upgrade, but the most recently acquired laptop probably won’t.
As for the desktop unable to upgrade and still running Windows XP, it’s alive and well and will continue to be so off the internet grid even after tomorrow. It won’t get updates for any software anymore, but since it’s not communicating with the outside world and doesn’t do much beyond word processing, a few spreadsheets and some games, it’s no big deal. It’s isolated, but still very functional. Eventually, it will meet its demise, its innards recycled and its shell, sadly, likely ending up in a landfill somewhere. But for the time being, it will continue on in spite of Microsoft’s choice to drop it like a hot potato.
It’s a hermit, not by choice, but by necessity, and it’s a working hermit at that.
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