Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
The other evening I had a friend visit me at the office. We had a whole stack of stuff to talk about and information to exchange: Word documents, Excel data, lots of maps, all sorts of stuff he was pulling out of an Access database.
No problem. He brought his laptop, and we were at the office, so there was any amount of assorted useful hardware lying around. First thing I did was grab a hub and plug his laptop into it so that he could share our broadband connection. We transferred several small things by simply posting them to my wiki (that's what we were there for, among other things, building the wiki). But then there was some bigger stuff, too big to send via the web. Hey - we were two feet apart! And here we were transferring files via California!
So, the obvious thing to do was connect my laptop to the office network (something I do regularly) and his laptop as well. But we had different default workgroup names. Sure, it's easy to change them, but I didn't really want to do that to my laptop and I certainly didn't want to do it to his, as XP can be such a bitch when you change that stuff. Hates changing back. (Mine runs 2000. Much safer.)
Couldn't I just browse to another workgroup? Yep. No problem. Except that I couldn't access his files because he didn't know his password.
Easy. Just go the other way: log onto my machine from his machine instead of the other way around. Ha! As usual, XP made a hopeless mess of things. It couldn't see my machine at all.
So I could see his machine but I couldn't log on; he could have logged on to my machine (I know my passwords) but XP couldn't see it. Impasse.
No problem: just make a new user on his machine (with a known password), reboot, and we have a network.
Woops! He doesn't have administrator rights. Doesn't know his Administrator password. I can make a new account on his machine so that I can access it from my machine, but I can't give it administrator status and it still won't let me in. Dumb users arent allowed to give away remote access rights. (And what moron set up his laptop? You may rest assured it wasn't us.)
Buggerit. Let's just burn a CD. Nope: his CD burner is external, and he left it at home. No problem, I have CD burners, we will just plug one in. Woops! Plenty of burners, but it's a laptop and I don't have a USB - IDE box in stock: sold the last one earlier this week.
How about a USB pen drive? I don't have one of those in stock either (very rarely get a buyer for them) but I remember selling him one a while back. Does he have it? Nope. Left that at home too. (Home is 30 kilometres away.)
Err.... Floppies? Nahh. Too small.
Right! Let's take a new desktop machine (there was one built already) and bolt a CD burner into it. Set it for workgroup "workgroup" and we can network away (only in one direction, but one direction is all we need), then burn the result onto CD-ROM. Yup. That did the trick. Except that there was too much to fit on one CD and (It being very late at night by this time) I made two copies of half the data and no copy of the other half. Didn't find that out till a couple of days later.
All in all, ignoring my brainfade mistake, we must have taken an hour and a half to transfer 900MB of data between two laptops two feet apart, and used a phenomenal amount of surplus hardware to achieve it. Two and a half hours if you count stopping for pizza.
Then, after we had dissassembled the jury-rig network, we remembered that there was another couple of hundred MB worth of images that we hadn't transferred yet. Doh!
It was at this point that my friend happened to remember that, hidden away in his PCMCIA slot, there was a flash card reader and a 128MB flash card. Was it possible to use that for file transfer?
DOH!
This reminded me that I too had a flash card reader in my PCMCIA slot, and an empty half-GB flashcard in it!
IDIOTS! FOOLS! MORONS!
Three minutes later we finished swapping flash cards and the job was done.
I knew I had a flash card. I knew that all along. I knew he had flash cards - hell, I sold the reader to him. It just didn't occur to me to use it for data. Flashcards are for putting in cameras, right? You use them for photography.
Neither one of us thought of using the flash cards to transfer Word documents. Neither one of us thought of using the flash cards to transfer Excel data, or Access stuff, or maps, or anything else. Then the moment we wanted to transfer some happy snaps, we thought "pictures", we thought "JPG files", we thought "digital cameras", we thought ...... we thought of the thing we should have thought of in the first place.
Gahh...
No problem. He brought his laptop, and we were at the office, so there was any amount of assorted useful hardware lying around. First thing I did was grab a hub and plug his laptop into it so that he could share our broadband connection. We transferred several small things by simply posting them to my wiki (that's what we were there for, among other things, building the wiki). But then there was some bigger stuff, too big to send via the web. Hey - we were two feet apart! And here we were transferring files via California!
So, the obvious thing to do was connect my laptop to the office network (something I do regularly) and his laptop as well. But we had different default workgroup names. Sure, it's easy to change them, but I didn't really want to do that to my laptop and I certainly didn't want to do it to his, as XP can be such a bitch when you change that stuff. Hates changing back. (Mine runs 2000. Much safer.)
Couldn't I just browse to another workgroup? Yep. No problem. Except that I couldn't access his files because he didn't know his password.
Easy. Just go the other way: log onto my machine from his machine instead of the other way around. Ha! As usual, XP made a hopeless mess of things. It couldn't see my machine at all.
So I could see his machine but I couldn't log on; he could have logged on to my machine (I know my passwords) but XP couldn't see it. Impasse.
No problem: just make a new user on his machine (with a known password), reboot, and we have a network.
Woops! He doesn't have administrator rights. Doesn't know his Administrator password. I can make a new account on his machine so that I can access it from my machine, but I can't give it administrator status and it still won't let me in. Dumb users arent allowed to give away remote access rights. (And what moron set up his laptop? You may rest assured it wasn't us.)
Buggerit. Let's just burn a CD. Nope: his CD burner is external, and he left it at home. No problem, I have CD burners, we will just plug one in. Woops! Plenty of burners, but it's a laptop and I don't have a USB - IDE box in stock: sold the last one earlier this week.
How about a USB pen drive? I don't have one of those in stock either (very rarely get a buyer for them) but I remember selling him one a while back. Does he have it? Nope. Left that at home too. (Home is 30 kilometres away.)
Err.... Floppies? Nahh. Too small.
Right! Let's take a new desktop machine (there was one built already) and bolt a CD burner into it. Set it for workgroup "workgroup" and we can network away (only in one direction, but one direction is all we need), then burn the result onto CD-ROM. Yup. That did the trick. Except that there was too much to fit on one CD and (It being very late at night by this time) I made two copies of half the data and no copy of the other half. Didn't find that out till a couple of days later.
All in all, ignoring my brainfade mistake, we must have taken an hour and a half to transfer 900MB of data between two laptops two feet apart, and used a phenomenal amount of surplus hardware to achieve it. Two and a half hours if you count stopping for pizza.
Then, after we had dissassembled the jury-rig network, we remembered that there was another couple of hundred MB worth of images that we hadn't transferred yet. Doh!
It was at this point that my friend happened to remember that, hidden away in his PCMCIA slot, there was a flash card reader and a 128MB flash card. Was it possible to use that for file transfer?
DOH!
This reminded me that I too had a flash card reader in my PCMCIA slot, and an empty half-GB flashcard in it!
IDIOTS! FOOLS! MORONS!
Three minutes later we finished swapping flash cards and the job was done.
I knew I had a flash card. I knew that all along. I knew he had flash cards - hell, I sold the reader to him. It just didn't occur to me to use it for data. Flashcards are for putting in cameras, right? You use them for photography.
Neither one of us thought of using the flash cards to transfer Word documents. Neither one of us thought of using the flash cards to transfer Excel data, or Access stuff, or maps, or anything else. Then the moment we wanted to transfer some happy snaps, we thought "pictures", we thought "JPG files", we thought "digital cameras", we thought ...... we thought of the thing we should have thought of in the first place.
Gahh...
